My Lords, voting is the sheet anchor of our democracy. This proposal to extend votes to 16 and 17 year-olds is an idea whose time has come. It already happens in Scotland and Wales within the United Kingdom. The Federal Republic of Germany, one of the greatest of our modern democracies—indeed, a democracy largely created by us in the 1940s—is about to introduce votes for 16 and 17 year-olds at the federal level under the new coalition agreement of the Government who are taking office, but votes for 16 and 17 year-olds in the federal states of Germany go back a long way and were first introduced in Lower Saxony 27 years ago in 1995.
I am struck by the fact that there is consensus in Scotland across all political parties in favour of the introduction of votes for 16 and 17 year-olds, which is universally regarded as a democratic success and led to a huge promotion of civic engagement in that great nation. Ruth Davidson, who has now joined us as the noble Baroness, Lady Davidson, and is a former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, describes herself as
“a fully paid-up member of the ‘votes at 16’ club”.
She said:
“We deem 16-year-olds adult enough to join the army, to have sex, get married, leave home and work full-time … they are old enough to vote too.”
She said of the experience of the independence referendum, when Scotland first introduced votes for 16 and 17 year-olds, that
“it appears 16 and 17-year-olds considered the facts just as rationally—if not more so—as everyone else.”
The noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, an esteemed Minister in this House and another former leader of the Conservatives in Scotland, is a strong supporter of votes at 16. When the legislation passed through the Scottish Parliament to introduce this reform, she said:
My Lords, it is an absolute pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I am sitting here wondering whether I would have stayed on at school to the sixth form if there had been a polling station. It might have ignited my interest a little more than education did.
I rise to make a couple of points and to support the noble Lord in his tireless attempt to get the vote for 16 and 17 year-olds. For the past two decades, I have had the privilege to spend time with many young people, first as the founder of Into Film, which runs thousands of film clubs across the UK in state schools, and now as chair of the 5Rights Foundation, which seeks to build the digital world that young people deserve. From this front-row position, I have repeatedly observed that in the political arena children are often spoken about but seldom heard, and that when it comes to investing money or political capital the interests of the young are woefully underrepresented.
Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says:
“States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”
That is why the working group on General Comment 25 on the relevance of children’s rights in the digital world, which I was lucky enough to chair, decided to undertake a global consultation with young people as part of our process. Colleagues from the University of Western Australia organised workshops with local partners that involved more than 1,000 children in 28 countries. The inclusion of children at this scale was unprecedented in the writing of a UN treaty, but when last year the General Comment was formally adopted by the Committee on the Rights of the Child it was not only widely embraced as a ground-breaking document in relation to the digital world but celebrated because, in spite of the fact that treaty documents are not known for their poetry, it vibrated with the lived experience and views of children from Kigali to Berlin, Karachi to Boston and beyond.
My Lords, Parliament has previously lowered the voting age in this country, from 21 to 18. That was in May 1969. In the 53 years since, there have been numerous attempts in both Houses of Parliament to lower it again. The first attempts to do so found little support, but support for the principle has grown considerably with every opportunity since then to discuss it. It has been my party’s policy for a long time and I think it is now the policy of all the main opposition parties, as well as many Conservatives. It is an idea whose time has come, and it will happen as soon as there is a change of Government—if not sooner.
The principle has already been embraced by this House, ironically ahead of the elected Chamber. In 2015, a cross-party amendment supporting votes at 16 in the EU referendum was carried here by 293 votes to 211. If that vote had not been subsequently overturned, the result of that referendum would have been even closer. Perhaps that reveals that the real reason for opposition to this proposal is not one of principle, other than the principle of trying to stay in power.
In my view, young people had a particular right to vote in the EU referendum because it was their future that was at stake, but that is really the case in every election. Young people aged 16 and 17 are now able to vote in local and devolved elections in Scotland and Wales, and many of them, but not all, have chosen to do so.
Many of us here have experience of speaking to sixth-form groups across the country and in the excellent Education Centre here in Parliament. We know that many of the groups we speak to are well informed, articulate and clearly able to participate in the democratic process. They talk about David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg and serious issues affecting the country and the rest of the world.
I have listened to arguments against allowing young people to vote at the first election after their 16th birthday. Most are based on trying to create the impression that such a measure would mean that young people must blow out the candles on their 16th birthday cake, when and with whom they are allowed to do so, and then immediately rush down to a polling station. Allowing votes at 16 does not make voting compulsory at that age. I am sometimes asked by sixth-formers whether I believe in making voting compulsory, as it is in Australia. I simply reply that, in my view, politicians are unpopular enough without fining people who do not vote for them.
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for introducing this measure. I was struck by the metaphor with which he opened: that voting is the sheet anchor of democracy. Of course, a vessel needs a lot more than a sheet anchor. It needs bows, bridges, rigging, sails, bulwarks and all the rest of it. In other words, to function, democracy relies on much more than a periodic right to mark a ballot paper. It relies on a series of norms and precedents; on a measure of restraint from the winner and a measure of acceptance from the loser; and, above all, on both sides being prepared to accept the rules and not to alter them for partisan purposes.
I am afraid that around the world we have seen a retreat from democracy as defined in that fuller sense. A number of organisations measure it: Freedom House, the democracy index of the Economist Intelligence Unit and others. They all tell a similar story: after decades of improving democracy, at some point in the last five or 10 years that progress stalled and began to go into reverse, often in countries where there is still a vote and people still have the franchise. But as in Venezuela, Russia or Iran, it is a meaningless vote because the other things you need to sustain a democracy have been vitiated or lost.
We see this happening even in some of the oldest core democracies in the world. In the United States in the last couple of decades, we have seen the deplorable way in which losers automatically go to law and dispute the results. Indeed, just over a year ago, we saw the readiness of the losing candidate to go along with an attempt to prevent the validation of the vote. It seems to me that when, in that country built constitutionally on the idea of popular sovereignty, there is this unwillingness to accept votes that go against you—this readiness to treat democracy as contingent—that should alarm us here.
My Lords, I start by paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. He has been utterly consistent over the years in his attempts to move electoral law in this direction. However, I do not think that repeated attempts at something necessarily imply their soundness. I am surprised that someone as committed as he is to the UK’s international affairs has said so little about the UK’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This recognises that individuals are children until they reach the age of 18.
The recognition that young people are defined as children is the foundation of our thinking about them when we wish to keep them out of harm’s way, particularly in conflict. In the late 1990s, I worked for the late Baroness Williams of Crosby in her attempts to prevent children from joining the Army. Her campaigning was rewarded in 2000 by the then Labour Government, who signed and implemented the optional protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to
“take every feasible step to ensure that children below the age of 18 years do not take part in hostilities”.
I hope that the noble Lord will not propose that we remove parental permission to allow children to join the Army after he has given them votes. However, the logic of his argument will inevitably take us there. If you can vote and stand for elected office at 16, it logically follows that you would stand—at this point no one has disputed that. I find it hard to understand how you could vote for elected office but be barred from standing for it. If that were to happen, as I argue would be the next step, then it would be an obscenity if you yourself were to call on others to make the ultimate sacrifice but would not lead from the front in doing so yourself. A child deciding to send an older man or woman into war does not fit with my moral compass, I am afraid.
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Adonis on bringing forward this Bill. I thank him for giving me a timely reminder that legislation can sometimes be empowering rather than oppressive.
I have long been an enthusiast for the extension of the franchise to 16 and 17 year-olds, since long before I joined a political party, and have found the arguments against it reminiscent of those once marshalled against votes for working people and for women. That the Government opposed this measure in their 2019 manifesto means little given that, by definition, the disenfranchised category could not endorse that; I suspect that it was not determinative in that election but I could be wrong about that.
Given the shenanigans contained in the pending Elections Bill, I have no doubt that some would ideally like to raise the voting age, perhaps to 39, or indeed reintroduce the property qualification, but I am not among their number. Of course, I accept that maturity is a gradual and organic process—and, judging by some of the behaviour that I have witnessed even in the Palace of Westminster over the years, it may not be complete at any particular age.
Still, the law requires some fixed, if necessary, arbitrary ages for the allocation of rights and obligations in a society. As voting is such a fundamental democratic right, it seems better to err on the side of enfranchisement rather than deprivation, particularly when general elections may come four or so years apart. To be just under 18 when a general election is held may leave a young citizen without an effective say until they are nearly 22. That is a long time, not just in politics but especially in a young life that we wish to include in and inspire with our democratic rituals.
I wish to make six arguments in favour of the age of 16. The first is probably older than the Boston Tea Party: no taxation without representation. Many young people work for low or no pay and, frankly, it is outrageous and an unjustified discrimination that they have a lower minimum wage of under £5 an hour when under 18. Those who perform vital and totally unpaid caring work in their homes for younger siblings, parents or grandparents are effectively subsidising the state with their unpaid labour, often at significant cost to their own health, education and life chances.
The noble Baroness referred to my role as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. I want to make it clear that in this debate I am speaking in a personal capacity, not representing the EHRC. I was in this House prior to becoming chair so have spoken on these matters in the past.
Indeed, but I was referring to the noble Baroness’s expertise rather than suggesting that she was speaking on its behalf. I am grateful for her clarification.
Fourthly and crucially, we think it acceptable for children to bear criminal responsibility for their actions at just 10 years old—a frankly barbaric state of affairs that your Lordships’ House neglected to remedy at the end of last year. I remember that the Minister was in the Chamber at that time, as was I. There is a whole eight-year gap between facing potential criminal sanction under the laws of the land and being able to elect those who shape them.
My next argument is that to extend the franchise in the manner proposed by my noble friend Lord Adonis could serve to enliven a crucial stage in the educational journey, making the learning of citizenship, humanities and applied science a vital practical exercise, not just an academic one, with, as my noble friend said, electoral candidates spending more time in schools and young people’s spaces, to the benefit of their own understanding of their constituents’ challenges. Like many noble Lords, I have had the enormous privilege of speaking in literally hundreds of schools and colleges over the years. My predominant experience is of secondary school-aged children increasingly concerned and curious about the state of the world, though not always encouraged and empowered to believe that they might affect it for the better. However, they might.
That brings me to my sixth and final argument, which concerns not what the vote could do for these young people but what they could do for the vote. That is not in a partisan sense, because I do not believe the noble Lords opposite need to be so pessimistic as to assume that any group is lost to one side of the argument or another in politics. How many in your Lordships’ House rely on children—or even, dare I say it, grandchildren—for advice or practical help, with matters relating to technology in particular? Who better to help to shape debates about online harms or the increasing algorithmic determinism that is in danger of hardwiring inequality and injustice into the human experience? In reciprocity, who better to lead the charge towards enfranchising our younger people than the mostly older heads of a wise and kindly, if unelected, Chamber demonstrating its imagination and independence?
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for having the chance to speak in this debate. I have an interest to declare in that I have a 16 year-old daughter. She is English, she lives in England, and she tells me that she supports this Bill because it will empower her as well, she adds, as others in her year group. Interestingly, she did not add the word “politically” until prompted. Teenagers do not put things into silos, as adults tend to; for them, everything is connected and part of the same world. If we trust 16 year-olds enough to get married and pay taxes, we should also trust them with the equally important business of voting. This may be a familiar argument; nevertheless, this inconsistency in responsibilities looks with every passing year increasingly wrong.
Regarding earlier comments, the teenage years are a tricky time, and there has to be a balance between empowerment and protection—but empowerment is a form of protection, and that should be acknowledged. This is also the direction in which countries are moving because of a growing sense that it is the right direction. One advantage of some countries paving the way is that there is increasing evidence about the effect of their moving the minimum voting age to 16. Studies are positive; in an article published last year in Parliamentary Affairs, its authors Jan Eichhorn and Johannes Bergh say:
“In none of the countries, for which data are now available, researchers could find negative effects of the lowering of the voting age on young people’s engagement or civic attitudes. In many instances the opposite was the case. Enfranchised 16- and 17-year-olds were often more interested in politics, more likely to vote and demonstrated other pro-civic attitudes (such as institutional trust). In many instances, young people enfranchised earlier were more engaged than those classically enfranchised at 18 and longer-term research from Austria and Latin American countries suggests that the effect may at least partially be retained throughout further years of life, resulting in turnout increases.”
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“The bill heralds an exciting era for our young people. It is an opportunity for them to continue their high level of engagement on topical affairs that we saw in the independence referendum.”
So this is not a party-political issue. Indeed, I believe that it is simply a matter of time before it is introduced. The House of Commons voted against it last week, with most Conservatives voting against, but I suspect that in the next Parliament or the Parliament after there will be consensus across the political parties for introducing this reform into national elections across the United Kingdom and local elections in England.
The evidence from Scotland is striking. In elections since the vote was extended to 16 and 17 year-olds, the participation of 16 and 17 year-olds has been at 75%—very significantly higher than the participation of young people in elections in England and the participation of the next age group going up in Scotland. Some 97% of those surveyed who voted said that they would vote in future elections. The accumulated survey evidence shows that not only has participation in elections risen significantly among 16 and 17 year-olds but, crucially, engagement in other aspects of civic affairs, including voluntary associations, the signing of petitions and engagement in public campaigns, has risen too.
The reason for this should not be any great surprise. All habits in life that stick start young. That is an almost invariable rule of life. If we want people to vote as a matter of course, which we do, we need to start young. Everyone accepts that 16 and 17 year-olds are young adults. It is absolutely right that we inculcate the most fundamental democratic practice, which is voting, at that age. When we look at the older age group, all the evidence is that once people start voting they invariably vote thereafter. The big problem we have is that such a low proportion of the over-18s start the practice of voting. Those who never start it early very rarely then take it up in due course.
Why should we think that starting voting at 16 and 17 is much more likely to promote participation? It is partly because of the facts. I have given the facts in respect of Scotland and there are now more than a dozen democracies worldwide that have voting at 16 and 17. The same pattern is observed in survey data in those democracies, notably Austria, which was the first European country to introduce voting at 16 and 17 back in 2007. Again, participation was higher, as was the continuation of participation.
The reason why we should expect it is that voting is part of the process of becoming a full citizen and adult. Just as 16 and 17 year-olds are preparing themselves for full participation in adult life in so many other ways by gaining qualifications, taking on personal responsibility and developing the range of interests that then informs their life, so, too, participating in elections and regarding democratic participation as a fundamental part of being an adult and a citizen needs to take root.
It is in that spirit that votes for 16 and 17 year-olds should go alongside two other reforms whose time I believe has also come. The first reform should be the automatic enrolment on the voting register of all 16 year- olds. When I was a student back in the 1980s, it was the practice for all over-18 year-olds at university to be automatically enrolled at that institution. Turnout was much higher than it has been since we have had individual enrolment on the voting register, with no obligation on academic institutions to register.
The second reform that I think is vital is that the automatic registration of 16 and 17 year-olds should be at their place of education, so that it becomes part of the process of becoming an adult and civic education that you vote, and there should be a polling station in every school, college and university to promote participation and make it easy for young people to participate—to make it an accepted part of what a 16 or 17 year-old does in May or whenever of each year that they vote. If there were a polling station in every school that had a sixth form, think what would happen. The politicians would all turn up. I can assure your Lordships that, if this was a big focus of voters who were all going to be turning out, then just as candidates visit care homes for the elderly, all of them would be in those schools too. It will not be just a question of mock elections, it will be real elections, not just for school councils governing what happens inside schools. As a former Education Minister, I can tell your Lordships that there is a huge move towards democracy within schools, and this is part of that process. It will be real politics that they will be really engaged in. Candidates will take a very full part in the work of schools in respect of democratic engagement, because they will have such a big interest to do so. If 16 year-olds were automatically registered at their place of study and there was a polling station in that place of study, we would see participation at 90%-plus, because it would be what young people do: when they go to school on voting day, they participate in the election—and once they have all begun that process, it will become a life habit and it will be a bedrock of our democracy.
The German coalition agreement which is leading to the extension of voting to 16 and 17 year-olds in federal elections is entitled Dare More Progress. That harks back to the great statement from the great educationalist John Dewey that the solution to the ills of democracy is more democracy. I believe the time has come for us to dare more progress. One of the solutions to the ills of democracy is more democracy among young adults, starting with the extension of the vote to 16 and 17 year-olds. I commend the Bill to the House, and I beg to move.
As an interesting aside, it was notable that there was greater consensus among our young contributors about the needs, values and practical application of children’s rights in the digital world than there was among the global community of experts and politicians. Any world in which young people already had a voice would have already seen the passage of the much-delayed online safety Bill, the introduction of age assurance, which we discussed this morning, and fair taxation of the tech sector.
Part two of Article 12 states that
“the child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law.”
But the reality of the current political process is that the preoccupations of those with votes to bestow become the preoccupations of the political marketplace in which votes are spent. As a result, we fail to represent the young. They have the worst employment rates, are paid less for their labour and have become burdened with debt for their education. Even in this period of eye-watering public spending of £400 billion to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, children and young people, who have suffered disproportionately and in ways that they may never recover from, have got a truly paltry settlement.
Again, we have consigned them to be poorer, to live at home for longer, to pay more for what we all took for granted and to look forward to bearing greater responsibilities for looking after the old—while leaving them the unpaid cheque. While we ask this under-represented group to suffer the consequences of decisions that older populations make in their own interests, we also demand that they make life-defining choices and show adult behaviours before the age at which they can vote: choices that tacitly require investment in a future over which they have no purchase. In doing so, we demand high levels of those same qualities that we doubt they own: those of maturity, commitment and wisdom.
My experience is that young people display wisdom, energy and foresight in copious quantities—but anyway, the right to vote is not contingent on maturity or wisdom. If it were, many of us adults might be considered unfit. Voting well or correctly is not a consideration here, but having a voice in the present and the future is. The arguments about introducing an unfit cadre into the electoral equation sound suspiciously like other arguments for exclusion made at other times about other groups.
The question that we need to answer is not about their suitability but about ours. We have allowed a crisis to develop—a lack of engagement and faith in the political process that threatens its legitimacy. We have failed to deal with many of the most intractable issues of the day, and we have left for the next generation a multitude of fiscal, environmental and political debts. Lowering the voting age is not a question of our altruism. It is about recalibrating power and ensuring that the long-term interests of the young form part of the political marketplace in which they can spend their votes.
If people are allowed to vote from 16, their first general election vote is likely to be possible sometime between the age of 16 and 20, while if the minimum age for voting remains at 18 for UK elections, their first vote is likely to become possible between the ages of 18 and 22, by which time it may be too late to begin the habit of voting.
If partisan considerations are put aside, I suspect that many people base their view of this issue on their own memories of being between 16 and 18. Some of us will remember the famous speech at the Conservative Party conference by the 16 year-old noble Lord, Lord Hague of Richmond. At that point, I was the 16 year- old secretary of the Liverpool, Wavertree constituency Liberal Association and was organising election campaigns as well as doing my O-levels. I was also a member of the Electoral Reform Society, and I agree with what it said some time ago, that
“not letting 16 and 17 year olds express their political views through the ballot box gives the impression to them and the rest of society that their views are not valid and that they are not real citizens. This contributes to the disconnection that many young people feel from the political process and structures”.
We should act to address that problem.
We need to ensure that citizenship is taken seriously in schools. We should support the aims of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Political Literacy, of which I am secretary. We should take every reasonable step to register young people to vote and afford them that right without the nonsense of having to opt in to the right to vote or obtain photo ID. We do not require people to opt in to the right to receive emergency medical support or the protection of other emergency services or our Armed Forces, so at the very least we should register all young people automatically, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said. The best time to do so would be when we issue them with their national insurance numbers.
In a previous debate here on a Bill to provide for votes from 16—one that was introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, from the Conservative Benches in 2003—the Minister replying from the Dispatch Box was the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton. He said then:
“While the Government are not necessarily opposed to the policy that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is seeking to push forward, we argue that his Bill is premature”.—[Official Report, 9/1/03; col. 1120.]
Nineteen years later, I believe that this Bill is long overdue.
By the way, the kinds of people who were the first to condemn Trump were usually not equally ready to condemn the attempts to overturn the 2016 referendum in this country, but it is pretty much the same thing. You either believe in the process that all the sides have agreed in advance is going to be valid, or you do not. The same hypocrisy applies the other way, of course. The people who were most ready to condemn the democracy blockers here were willing to overlook some of Trump’s excesses.
That, in a way, is the problem. It is in some ways remarkable that we ever elevated process over outcome. It is an extraordinary thing and may come to be seen as a blip that the American electorate were more loyal to a desiccated piece of parchment hanging in the National Archives than to a real flesh and blood candidate. Yet that readiness to accept the results, and to elevate process over outcome, is what makes for a free society.
Are we confident that this attempt to change the franchise is being done purely in a disinterested spirit as a way of strengthening our democracy? Or might we allow the possibility that it is being advanced in some quarters, again, as an outcome-led measure—that people assume that 16 and 17 year-olds will vote in a particular way, reason backwards from that conclusion and come up with all sorts of more general arguments for it? Can we confidently say that the extension of the franchise to 16 year-olds, first in Scotland and then in Wales, was wholly divorced from any consideration of how they might vote in either referendums or general elections? Your Lordships’ Chamber discussed the measure that the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, mentioned to extend the franchise to 16 year-olds in the EU referendum. Can we confidently say that those who were voting for the extension of the franchise had no particular vested interest in how that vote would go—that it was sheer coincidence that they happened to put those two issues together?
I cannot definitively answer that question; we all have our own motives and principles, and I am not peering into the souls of other Peers. I simply make this observation: the first time that I stood here on a Friday, the first of these debates that I participated in, last year, happened to be on a measure about the legal age at which you were allowed to take Botox as a treatment. Unlike today—when, as usual on a Friday, I am in a minority of one or two—there was an extraordinary consensus on all sides. Every speaker argued that it was right to raise the age of consent for Botox from 16 to 18. That was the message that came from the Cross Benches, the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Conservatives.
We heard all sorts of arguments, including one or two from Peers who are present today, about how this was consistent because we treated 18 as the age of consent in almost every other regard. Peer after Peer stood up to explain that 18 was the age at which you could get a mortgage, buy a bottle of wine, get a tattoo or buy a knife; and, one after another, people said, “Yes, absolutely right. There is such a thing as an age of maturity and, if we have decided that 18 is that age, we must end these loopholes on things like Botox and tattoos.”
Well, that is fine—but if as a country we have decided that that is the age of maturity, are we seriously going to argue that, while 16 and 17 year-olds should be prohibited from doing all those things, they should have the right to vote on whether everyone else is allowed to do those things? Are noble Lords seriously confident that that will be seen as a purely disinterested measure without any partisan calculation behind it? I suggest that one way to encourage turnout and tackle the cynicism of some of our voters is visibly to stop playing partisan games with the franchise.
I also want to argue a general point—one picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere—that, before we move to a system whereby we decide to lower the age of voting, we need to think about the rights agenda as a comprehensive whole. I refer to the legal fragmentation that exists when we consider someone a “child” for the purpose of considering their status as a rights-bearing individual, as opposed to when we sanction them for wrongdoing. This framework overall is confused and irrational, and requires a comprehensive rethink across the board.
I personally consider it an abuse by the state to continue to hold to an age of criminal responsibility of 10, on the one hand, with all the irreversible damage that it will do to a child, while denying them full employment rights until they are 18. Not only do we deny them employment rights, but we detract from their rights by having different categories of minimum wage, as if a strapping 17 year-old in a warehouse is somehow less capable of stacking shelves than a 44 year-old.
However, employment rights are perhaps a debate for another day; I will stick to this one. I want to highlight some of the other inconsistencies and confusion of who is and who is not a child for the purposes of this legislation, something which the supporters of the Bill might wish to consider. The Gambling Act prohibits those under the age of 18 from gambling or placing a bet in a casino or betting shop. If we can vote at 16, and thus, as I argue, stand as a candidate at 16, surely we ought to be able to take a flutter on an election result at 16. Moreover, we have moved the minimum age for participation in National Lottery games from 16 to 18 since last year; I understand that that was a Labour amendment. The direction of travel when we look at contemporary harms, rightly, is to move the age upwards, not downwards.
The Children and Families Act 2014 was concerned with the health effects of smoking, and banned smoking by adults when children under 18 were present in a car. In this case, the state was expected to infringe on the Article 8 rights—respect for a private life, family life and so on—to protect the health of “children” under 18. In the same space, on health, the parties opposite are all over the place, wanting a ban on the sale of tobacco products to under 21 year-olds; I think that is the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. One gets the sense that, instead of defending the autonomy and choices available to young people, there is a lack of proportion in these kinds of policies. On this one, I would have thought that young people needed education on the harmful effects of substances, not bans under the guise of “protection of childhood” while we move selectively to change the definition of childhood in the Bill.
When thinking about young people as rights-holders and duty-bearers, we as lawmakers still have some way to go. I want to talk in more positive terms of what we might do to engage young people in participating as active citizens; voting is only one criterion of that, sheet anchor though it might be. As we become a more “rights-bearing” society, while simultaneously becoming more litigious, it is increasingly obvious that citizens have a rather patchy understanding of their rights. Citizenship education, which is a relatively recent innovation in this country, introduced to the curriculum 20 years ago, is still rather inadequate.
One of the reasons why society is so polarised is because people have very different understandings of what is and is not within the law. One area that we see a lot of is a lack of public understanding around discrimination, harassment and victimisation. Another is the boundary between freedom of expression and what is referred to as hate speech. These issues create friction and contestation every day, day in and day out.
My point is that before we can make voters out of our citizens, we need to share some basic concepts about the duties that they owe to one another that go along with the rights that they will exercise. One 16 year-old will be very different in maturity from another, but if they have both benefited from better knowledge of the public square then they will be better equipped to live well together in it. Voting is simply one component of that democracy. I applaud the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for his determination but I suggest that his efforts to improve our democracy would bear more fruit if we spent more energy on changing the culture of politics rather than the processes of its manifestation.
That leads me to my second argument—namely, that the electorate and successive Governments neglect the interests of the disenfranchised in public spending and prioritisation decisions over, for example, children and young people’s health, especially mental health, and other services. This warping of priorities becomes especially dangerous in the context of climate catastrophe, for example, which is perhaps more readily ignored, sometimes to the point of delusion, by those less likely to live to see its more dramatic consequences.
Thirdly, I must point to other things we believe it is appropriate for a 16 year-old to do, including consenting to sex; marrying or joining the military with parental consent; otherwise leaving home; driving a moped or, I believe, a small tractor, not that I have had experience of that; flying a glider; drinking a beer, cider or glass of wine with a meal in a restaurant; investing in a cash ISA, apparently—I guess for some but not for others; consenting to medical treatment; and changing their name by deed poll. I say to the two noble Lords opposite who just spoke that Botox is harmful, as is putting yourself in the field of battle, but voting is not.
With the greatest respect to the noble Baroness who is chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, in 30 years as a human rights lawyer, I have never heard an interpretation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that says it prohibits voting under the age of 18.
As the noble Lord has said, analysis following the Scottish referendum showed that 16 and 17 year-olds had higher rates of turnout than 18 to 24 year-olds, with 75% voting and 97% saying that they would vote in future elections. In Austria, voting among 16 and 17 year-olds has been higher than for over 50s, so these are effects that can be widely observed.
The effect of this change is perhaps more far-reaching, in a beneficial way, than one might at first have imagined. Extending the franchise is about deepening our democracy because of the further political engagement and empowerment that this will allow our young people, as my daughter believes. But it seems clear, too, that the 16 to 18 window is a key time when the interest in politics of young people needs to be capitalised on by society, including through education, otherwise it can be lost.
In 2011, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for a lower age, basing that resolution on the evidence that had by then already been gathered. It is my belief that it is just a matter of time before this becomes law, as it should be, across Europe. It is being seriously debated in Ireland, and Scotland and Wales are of course very much in the forefront of this change, alongside Austria and parts of the systems of other European countries, including Germany and Switzerland, as well as further afield. But within the UK, England, along with Northern Ireland, is starting to look like an outlier.
Surely, we cannot maintain indefinitely a situation whereby young people in one part of the UK have different rights to others in this fundamental respect. Of course, the minimum age for general elections across the UK remains 18, and England does not have its own Parliament, as it should have. Nevertheless, what is in effect a democratic deficit in England for young people needs to be—using the current terminology—levelled up, including, dare one say it, for any possible future UK referenda. As much as they are able to do so, Scotland and Wales are doing the right thing; England needs to join them so that we are on the same page on this for all elections.