Contribution
My Lords, I was sad to hear from the right reverend Prelate that this was his last contribution in the House and that he is retiring at the end of the month. I served with him on the Council for Christians and Jews—he was a chairman and I was a Christian vice-chairman—and I was thankful for his leadership, wisdom and kindness. I wish him well in his retirement.
I will speak mainly against plans to lower the voting age to 16, on three grounds: evidence of brain development; the confusion they bring to our policy approach to maturity; and their reinforcement of shopper politics, where building the good society matters less than giving ever more stuff to voters. Young people face an array of wicked policy problems, and successfully tackling just one of these would make a far more tangible difference to their outcomes.
I am concerned about registering 14 year-olds as attainers, given the extra layers of safeguarding required for those at confidential addresses who have fled domestic abuse or other threats. This will intensify bureaucratic burdens without guaranteeing safety. The more systems in which an address is recorded and the more people who may lawfully access it, the greater the potential for error or unauthorised disclosure. The Government consider such data to be sensitive enough to require the special non-disclosure regime laid out in Clauses 7 to 14, but can the Minister explain why they should collect and maintain electoral registration data on children two years before they can vote, putting an additional younger birth cohort at risk?
In Committee in the Commons, the Minister pleaded consistency with current arrangements where 16 and 17 year-old attainers are on the register—yet lowering the voting age is profoundly inconsistent with other policy areas. Staff I meet across the youth custody estate punctiliously refer to 16 and 17 year-olds as children, precisely because of their relative immaturity. Practitioners who support 16 and 17 year-olds’ mental health tell me that they have so many other life issues that they are trying to come to terms with. Military recruitment of under-18s demonstrates that they are not fully autonomous adults but require special protection. They need parental permission, are not sent into combat and are still considered to be in secondary education. Lowering the voting age increases the risk that young people, especially young women in some communities, are pressurised to vote in a family bloc, as we have heard elsewhere.
During Commons stages debates about reducing the voting age, one supporter pointed to young carers having already carried onerous familial responsibilities for over a decade. But what has that got to do with it? Their exceptional hardships are, thankfully, not typical. Neither are the under-18 youth mayors, held up as exemplars for giving all 16 and 17 year-olds the vote. Worthy anecdotes are not evidence of cohort-wide maturity.
Ironically, neuroscience has heightened awareness, as never before, of how very much more maturing the brain still needs to do at 16. World-renowned developmental psychologist Professor Laurence Steinberg found that the sweet spot for resistance to peer influences is 18. By this point, the majority have developed the capacity to stand up for what they believe and withstand peer pressure to do otherwise. Other studies show that the brain’s control system or executive functions that help young people manage their thoughts, behaviour and decisions in pursuit of a goal grow rapidly from late childhood to mid-teens, stabilising to adult levels only in late adolescence, at 18 to 20 years old.
Executive functions govern how effectively a person can regulate their emotional reactions—perhaps to a TikTok video, as we have heard—evaluate the effects of different influences and decide independently. Voting at 18 means that as many as possible are able, as far as possible, to make independent judgments, hold competing arguments in mind, resist others’ views and consider longer-term consequences. The noble Lord, Lord Macintosh of Eastwood, in his commendable maiden speech, highlighted the higher turnout in Scotland, but many 16 to 18 year-olds are still embedded in families and schools where peer pressures can be considerably amplified.
The Commons Minister said that the voting age should be lowered simply because young people are “our nation’s future”. That argument is simply unsustainable. We invest in the first 1,001 days of a child’s life because infants are also our nation’s future. Lowering the voting age means taking an evidentially indefensible step in terms of child protection, requiring a complex legislative and bureaucratic underpinning, perhaps solely for political advantage. More feel-good shopper politics will not solve the problems facing this country, and especially our young people.