Voting Age

Fabian Hamilton Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams) on securing the debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing it to take place. It is important, at this stage of this Parliament, and after so many years have elapsed since the hon. Gentleman’s original Bill, that we should have the chance to debate—and, I hope, to vote on—this important subject.

Like most Members of Parliament, I spend quite a bit of time visiting sixth forms and meeting members of school councils, and teachers and pupils. Just last Friday, I was at Roundhay high school in my constituency, where I met the politics AS-level group—a group of about 20 16 and 17-year-olds. We had a discussion for about an hour and a half, and it would have been longer if they had not had to go to a different class. The quality of the teaching and, more important, the quality of the opinions and the questions, was absolutely brilliant. That made me realise that I was right to co-sponsor the hon. Gentleman’s debate this afternoon. Listening to those 16 and 17-year-olds, I felt that they were well ready to make a decision about who should represent them in this Parliament, who should be the Government of the day and—something that we have perhaps overlooked—who should run their local authority. Local authorities are still important bodies in the lives of the young people in our towns, cities and regions. I felt reassured, listening to those young people.

I have been to many different schools, as we all have. I have visited Allerton high school, Allerton Grange high school, Carr Manor high school and Cardinal Heenan Catholic high school. I have listened to sixth-form groups in those schools discussing politics. They have asked me deep, searching questions about why I became a politician, what we do in this place and how that affects their lives. I feel that it is really time for them to have a chance to make their judgment, locally and nationally, in our elections.

[Philip Davies]

When the hon. Gentleman was in those schools, telling the young people how well educated, well informed and intelligent they were, and how they should be able to make all those decisions, did he also explain to them why he did not think they were intelligent, informed or educated enough to make a decision on whether or not to smoke?

[Fabian Hamilton]

I share the view of the hon. Member for Bristol West that there is not one age for everything. We allow our young people to drive at the age of 17, but not to vote at that age. Why are they deemed old enough to be in charge of a vehicle that could be a lethal weapon, but not old enough to vote? Why do we allow them to join the Army or get married at the age of 16, but not allow them to vote? There are different ages for different activities in our society. Also, protecting young people from the pervasive influence of the dangerous habit of smoking—[Interruption.] Does the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) wish to intervene on me again?

[Philip Davies]

It was the hon. Gentleman who was leading with his chin and telling us how well informed and well educated those young people were. They are either well informed and well educated, or they are not. If they are so well informed and well educated, surely they are more than capable of making a decision on smoking, too. We cannot say that they are well informed in one area but absolutely clueless about everything else.

[Fabian Hamilton]

I do not believe that they are clueless; a lot of young people are well informed. The issue of smoking and health is different from marriage, driving a vehicle or fighting for one’s country.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

Could not the question of whether young people are well informed enough to make a decision about smoking be tested by giving them the vote, so that their representatives here could reflect what they thought on a range of issues, including their capacity to get a mortgage, an affordable pension or a job? All the decisions that we take here affect their lives, yet they have no say in those matters at the moment. The decision to smoke is just part of that parcel. The solution lies in giving them the vote.

[Fabian Hamilton]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. Indeed, if young people aged 16 were able to vote, perhaps their representatives here in the House of Commons might change their minds on smoking not being allowed until the age of 18.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

Our colleague and hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) may have helped us a bit. The question essentially comes down to whether giving teenagers the opportunity to register to vote at 16 will do any harm. The answer is clearly no. Can it do any good? The answer is yes. On the point about smoking, only teenagers take it up: it is not an adult thing to do but a childish thing.

[Fabian Hamilton]

There is little I can add to the hon. Gentleman’s points. I agree wholeheartedly with them.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Before my hon. Friend moves on from this point, let me say that the issue is also about our behaviour and how we respond to young people’s concerns. We hear a lot about the grey vote, but we do not hear much about what younger people think or are worried about.

[Fabian Hamilton]

I agree with my hon. Friend. It is all the more important, now that we have an ageing population—as the hon. Member for Bristol West said, a much higher proportion of older people cast their votes—that we extend the franchise to 16-year-olds as well. As I said earlier, I believe them to be more than capable of making a judgment about who they want to represent them at the local authority level and at the parliamentary and governmental level.

[Mr Sheerman]

My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe)—and he is real friend, not just in the formal sense—put forward a ruthless logic, but that logic leads to the question “Why not 14; why not 12?” Adopting his logic, where should we set the age for voting?

[Fabian Hamilton]

I would answer my hon. Friend—and he is a very good friend—by saying that we have to make a judgment, and that young people have to demonstrate whether or not they are able to make the sorts of judgments we expect in their choice of who they want to represent them. In my experience—and, I am sure, in my hon. Friend’s experience—a 14-year-old does not quite have the maturity or ability to make that judgment, whereas most 16-year-olds certainly do. The point was well made by the hon. Member for Bristol West—we will not have loads of 16-year-olds suddenly heading off towards the polling station when they become 16. In fact, the young people are more likely to be 17 or 18 when the election comes about—unless it is in local government, as many of our towns and cities have annual elections three out of four years.

The age may well come down to 14 as young people get more mature, but we are debating votes at 16. In that case, I think, as many hon. Members and most of my party colleagues think, that from 16 onwards young people are mature enough, bright enough and educated enough to make those judgments. [Interruption.] That is my view; I know my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) has a different view.

Let me move on to the issue of school councils. I do not know whether many Members have attended elections for school councils or spoken to any school councils, but I have been invited, as I know have many Members, to meet them—including often to primary school councils, too. [Interruption.] I am staggered—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Shipley wants to keep on making comments from a sedentary position, I will allow him to make an intervention. Otherwise,I would be grateful if he stopped.

[Philip Davies]

If the hon. Gentleman is using school councils as an argument for extending the vote, he should remember that he himself said that they take place at primary school level, too. By that ruthless logic, I presume he is now going to advocate giving primary school children the vote.

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[Fabian Hamilton]

I answered that point when I responded to my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield. My judgment, as a parent of three children and as someone who regularly meets young people, is that 16-plus is the age at which young people are mature enough to make the sort of decisions we expect when they cast a vote. I do not believe that that is the case for five and six-year-olds are, although they vote in some school council elections.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I would like to tell my hon. Friend about the young mayor of Newham, who has a £25,000 budget. In the most recent vote for our young mayor, 13,500 young people voted. That shows a thirst for engagement, and I think it is a thirst that we should recognise.

[Fabian Hamilton]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. That is precisely the point I am trying to make. I was coming on to talk about school councils, because I have been impressed by the enthusiasm for voting, and by the interest, knowledge and understanding of what happens in a primary or a secondary school and of what a school council can achieve. It is on a very small scale, but it is a very good start. As the hon. Member for Bristol West said, if people get into the habit of voting at that young age, perhaps we will see a much higher turnout at elections.

I want to take Members back to what was a low point in this country’s electoral history: the police and crime commissioner elections. I am not going to rehearse the reasons why those elections had such a poor turnout—in west Yorkshire, it was 13.7%—but I venture to suggest that if 16-year-olds had had the right to vote on 15 November, turnout might have been over 15%. That is still an absolutely appalling figure, but it would have made some difference. There was a thirst for and an interest in voting among young people—even in those elections, which were so badly publicised. Indeed, when I visited Roundhay high school last Friday, I was asked about the turnout of those elections and the reasons why they had taken place in November in the first place.

When I was at school—a long, long time ago, in the ’60s and ’70s—we studied a subject called civics. I know that that has since evolved, but I found civics very useful, and its modern counterpart, of course, is far more useful. The point about that subject was to understand the institutions of government, both locally and nationally. How many Members have had e-mails and letters from constituents—many such constituents are pretty mature, certainly well over 16 or 18—saying, “Dear Member of Parliament, I want you to do something about the state of the streets in my area”, or saying that they want them to sort out their council house, their property, or the windows? They believe us to be councillors, too. I even got an e-mail the other day from somebody that began, “Dear Councillor Hamilton”. She wanted me to sort out what was purely a local authority issue, and I had to point out that I have not been a councillor for 15 years.

My point is that if 16-year-olds were able to vote, the education they were receiving at school about our governmental institutions, about how our constitution actually works, would be far more pertinent and relevant, because the next year or the next month—whenever they pass the age of 16—while they were still studying, they could cast their vote in a local authority election that has a direct relevance to them, and now, of course, in the five-yearly police and crime commissioner elections, too.

We have an age of consent of 16. At 16, people can drive a scooter. At 16, people can fight for their country—[Interruption.] Sorry; people can join the Army at 16. At 17, they can drive a car. At 16, they can get married with parental permission.

[Mr Sheerman]

With parental permission.

[Fabian Hamilton]

Yes, with parental permission.

We had a youth Parliament in the city of Leeds, as many cities do. The awards were given in the banqueting suite of our Leeds civic hall, and they were handed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn). The turnout was brilliant. The enthusiasm and support from parents and young people were absolutely magnificent. That told me that increasingly our young people are able to make a judgment about who they want in this House; who they want to run their Government, because that affects them; and who they want to run their local authority. I therefore urge this House to vote for votes for 16-year-olds.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

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[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I will do my best to stick to that time scale, Mr. Speaker, because I am anxious for other Members to have an opportunity to speak.

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel). As she knows, I admire her greatly. On this particular issue, however, I am afraid that I cannot support her.

It is a topsy-turvy world that we live in, Mr. Speaker. Today I found myself agreeing with the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman)—I had thought it very unlikely that I would ever find a subject on which I could agree with him, but I am delighted that we have finally settled on at least one—and also listening to members of the party of the nanny state on the Opposition Benches giving lecture after lecture about the benefits of giving people responsibility for making decisions about their own lives.

I have been in the House for eight years. For eight years I have sat opposite Labour Members who have lectured us on how we cannot let people take responsibility for their own lives. People cannot make decisions for themselves; the state must intervene and make the decisions for them. Yet, today of all days, we have been told that it is absolutely crucial for us to give people responsibility for their own lives and trust them to make decisions. I hope that the same pattern will be followed when it comes to other issues, and that from now on the Labour party will adopt the approach of trusting not just 16 and 17-year-olds but people over the age of 18 to make their own decisions on how they live their lives. If that is the only consequence of today’s debate, it will have been worth while.

I tried to jot down the arguments that I heard today for reducing the voting age to 16. A common theme emerged: Members had visited local schools, had spoken to 16 and 17-year-olds at colleges and in sixth forms, and had been so impressed by the quality of the questions that were asked and the opinions that were formed that they concluded that it was time to give those young people the vote.

[Fabian Hamilton]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Philip Davies]

I would normally, but I want everyone to have an opportunity to speak.

Let me say from the word go that I spend a lot of time visiting schools in my constituency—primary and secondary schools—and that, in my view, some of the most challenging questions that a Member of Parliament is ever asked are asked by people who are at school. I have thoroughly enjoyed debates with very talented people of all ages in schools, some of whom have been greatly interested in politics and some of whom have had no interest in it at all.

As with so many other issues, the voting age is always a matter of judgment. There will always be exceptions to rules. There will always be 16-year-olds who have the deep interest and maturity that would enable them to make informed decisions when voting, and there will always be 18-year-olds who do not possess the same level of maturity and interest. There will always be anomalies of that kind. This debate is not about individual cases; it is about what we think should be the general principle. That is the judgment that must be made.

In my view, the argument that many 16 and 17-year-olds ask very intelligent, very searching questions and are able to engage in a sensible debate is not a sufficient argument for giving them the vote. In fact, I would contend that the most searching questions that I am asked as a Member of Parliament come from kids at primary school rather than from 16 and 17-year-olds. Primary school children tend to throw questions at us that we would never have expected, and which we have never heard of or thought of before. They catch us totally off guard.

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[Simon Hughes]

That, in a way, is my central argument, and I will come back to it. My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West was kind enough to remind the House that I was the first person to introduce this proposition. I have checked; it was in Committee stage of the Representation of the People Bill on 15 December 1999. Mike O’Brien, whom we all remember with affection, was the Under-Secretary of State, and he opposed the proposition on behalf of the Labour Government, although we reported that Paul Waugh of The Independent had written an article on the previous new year’s eve saying that the Labour Government were thinking about whether they should propose changing the law. My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West was right to say that we did not get the measure through; the votes were 36 in favour and 434 against.

One of the then Minister’s strongest arguments was that a person could not stand for election until they were 21. That has changed; people can now stand in local elections when they are 18, and they do—and get elected. The discrepancy has narrowed. My key point is this: if we educate young people to understand the issues, as the House’s education department does, and as we do when we go into schools; if, when children are still at home, parents educate them on the issues; if, as colleagues in all parts of the House have said, we are keen for people to be more competent to make financial decisions when they leave school; if we want to make sure that young people understand how to apply for work, and look for training, a university or college, apprenticeships and so on, and have the information that they need; we should logically link that with the ability to see what the options are in life, and who makes those decisions.

Who decides whether a person can be housed locally? The local council, and therefore it matters who the local councillor is and whether they are likely to be responsive. Who makes the decisions in London about policing? The Mayor of London. A young person might have very strong views on the subject, and might want to do something to influence the decision of who becomes the Mayor. Who makes the decisions about licensing laws and ages, and about drugs? Parliament, and young people might want to influence it if they have very strong views on those issues.

The crucial point is the one that the hon. Member for York Central and I made. If we educate young people—we do it increasingly well with an increasingly bright cohort—and there is a gap of up to five years before they can apply what they have learned, what happens? First, when they can vote, they may not be at home; they may be struggling to find somewhere to live, and be moving around. Relationships are often all over the place. There are uncertainties to do with study, training and work. People then generally do not find that voting is a priority, because they do not have the stability that they had at school, college or home.

In the past, people voted much more often in the way that their family did Now, if young people are at home, it does not necessarily mean that they will vote the way their parents do, but they are much more likely to be encouraged to go to vote with their parents, and to be shown what to do. Some people do not vote because they do not know what to do, and they are terrified that they will be embarrassed when they go.

[Fabian Hamilton]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that those of us who are parents, whether in the House or outside, have a crucial role in ensuring, well before our children are 16, that they will have the understanding and ability to vote at 16, and that we can therefore play a part in making sure that votes at 16 work?

[Simon Hughes]

That is right, and I say to those Conservative colleagues who are nervous about the idea that of course we have different ages for different things; we will never get to a situation in this country where every right comes at 16, 17 or 18; that is unrealistic. However, it is often young people who are the most idealistic in the world—who want to change the world, and live out what they believe. If we start saying, “No, you can’t get involved at this age. I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait. You can’t do anything about it till you’re 19, 20 or 21,” by then the idealism may have gone and we will have dampened their enthusiasm.

We want more people to stand in political elections. All political parties, including the Tories, allow people to join and to vote at well under 18. At 15, I think, one can be a voting member of the Tory party, choosing the party leader. For heaven’s sake, let us realise that although not all the world has yet arrived at this conclusion, we must go on opening up opportunities to young people, not making them do anything, but giving them the opportunity to become the full citizens that they will be if they can exercise the vote in this country.

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[Mr Sheerman]

No, I will not give way. The hon. Gentleman, who is a great friend of mine, made quite a long speech. I want to carry on making my case.

I believe that pushing childhood back makes many young children vulnerable at a crucial age. Those of us who have spent time with children—I have four children and oodles of grandchildren—know that they are very vulnerable between the ages of 14 and 18. We can wish that away or pretend it is not the case, but my experience as Chairman of the Education Committee and then of the Children, Schools and Families Committee has taught me that that is a very sensitive age for young people.

I understand where the motion is coming from. It is a fashionable cause at present. When the president of the Liberal party back in those days, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), made that speech and moved that motion, I remember that people said, “Oh, it’s only those trendy Liberal Democrats looking for young votes,” and I said, “No, no, he is a man of honour and he believes this for very good reasons.” My own party has been won over. The deputy leader of my party and others have become passionate about it. I opposed lowering the voting age being in our manifesto and believed it was wrong—again, because I believed it made the protection of children a lesser issue than it might otherwise be.

[Fabian Hamilton]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Sheerman]

May I put that point in context? I believe that part of the demand and the fashion of votes at 16 comes from the fact that our parliamentary democracy is in deep trouble. We know that only 65% voted at the last election and that 6 million people did not bother to register. We all know that the three main parties represented in this place have hardly any members in their constituencies—tiny numbers of people active in politics. I know that the Liberal Democrats have believed in proportional representation to do something about that, but we are all floundering around because there is something deeply wrong with the engagement in democracy in our country today.

The demand for votes at 16 is clutching at straws. I understand it and I do not deny that there are arguments for it, but I worry that it is a pretext for not looking at the deeply worrying decay of parliamentary democracy in our country. I hope this does not come to a vote. Everyone on the Labour Benches knows that I am a reasonable man. At the very least, I would like the Government to set up a commission on an all-party basis to look into the matter. If my concerns and worries about the protection of children are ill-founded, an independent commission looking at that might give me cause not to worry any longer, but I believe that the voice that has been silent in the House today has been one arguing for childhood, the protection of childhood and the value of childhood.