Elections: Weekend Voting

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the previous Government conducted a consultation exercise in 2008 on whether or not to move the day of voting to the weekend. The majority of responses to that consultation were against such a move. Of course, there are additional costs of transferring voting to a Sunday. If one were to have voting on two days over the weekend, it is likely that those costs would be in the order of £100 million-plus. I know that the Department for Education has suggested that schools that have to close for voting should use that day for staff training as a means of minimising the loss of teaching time.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, is not the fact that elections take place on a Thursday and children are not in school a good way of ensuring that they know that something is happening? Would it not be a very good thing if teachers had to ensure that the day before an election they explained about elections? At least then we would have one day when democracy was discussed.