Votes at 16: a Labour stitch-up?

A few years ago many argued (me included) that much in the Conservatives’ 2022 Election Act was more to do with seeking party political electoral advantage than improving the voting system. But will Labour’s answer to it — votes at 16 — be an equally partisan attempt to make voting easier for its supporters? If the Conservatives’ 2022 Act’s most controversial measure was the Voter ID requirement, Labour’s most eye-catching proposal is to reduce the voting age to 16. It was in Labour’s 2024 manifesto and will be a priority for the man tasked with this measure by the PM, incoming Communities Secretary Steve Reed. Polling shows that young people lean disproportionally leftwards; isn’t this Labour just enfranchising its natural supporters?

The Conservatives’ 2022 Election Act introduced a requirement for voters on the mainland to present a form of photo ID in polling stations. The measure was condemned by campaigners as “voter suppression”, making it difficult or impossible for opponents’ supporters to vote. The argument in favour of the change was that voters in Northern Ireland had been required to present ID since 1985 and photo ID since 2003, in order to prevent personation (the offence of casting someone else’s vote) and that their act just made voting arrangements consistent across the UK.

But the evidence didn’t stack up:  there had been a far greater incidence of voting fraud in Northern Ireland than on the mainland prior to 1985, summed up in the maxim “vote early and vote often”. On the mainland, there were never more than a handful of cases a year among the millions of votes cast and those were normally genuine mistakes — for example, innocently voting for an incapacitated relative. The allegation of a sinister motive was a result of analysis of the likely effect of the measure. The two principal forms of photo ID commonly available to voters were driving licences and passports. Both were expensive to obtain and only of use to car-owners and those who travelled abroad — the preserve of better-off voters, then more likely to vote Conservative. Research showed that the demographics less likely to hold either driving licence or passport were younger and lower-income voters, ethnic minorities and groups such as renters rather than home-owners – all less likely to vote Conservative.

It is a well-established given of British electoral life that Conservative voters are less likely to be deterred from voting by, for example, rain than Labour supporters. Fine weather — equating with high turnout – is, therefore, supposedly “good for Labour”.

The suspicion of a malign motive only deepened when the Conservative government published the forms of acceptable ID: the older persons’ travel pass was included, younger persons’ travel passes and student union cards were not – research shows older people are far more likely to vote Conservative than the young.  A Lords’ amendment widening acceptable forms of ID, introduced by a Conservative peer, was thrown out when the Bill returned to the House of Commons by a government seemingly uninterested in making it easier for people to vote. Two per cent of voters did not hold a form of ID on the list and 4% of non-voters at the 2024 general election cited it as a reason for not voting.

Not surprisingly, the newly-elected Labour government has said it will level the playing field. It followed up manifesto commitments with a new measure published in July that said it will considerably widens the number of acceptable forms of ID, for example to include bank cards (the vast majority of young people have a bank account) and adding a number of forms of digital ID. If the motive behind

Photo ID had been to create a barrier to voting (and the presumption being likely Labour supporters) the answer seems to be that it did. Data collected by the Electoral Commission at polling stations in the 2024 general election found that a quarter of one per cent of people who came to polling stations were turned away for lacking the correct form of ID. Two thirds of those did return later in the day with a correct form but that still meant that 0.08% or 16,000 people did not and all the evidence points to ‘flaky’ voters like that supporting other parties than the Conservatives.

The Electoral Commission went further and acknowledged that those figures would be an underestimate because of those who, knowing they did not have the correct ID, simply did not bother to go to a polling station. That is not a massive number amongst the millions who vote in a general election but seven seats in 2024 had majorities of less than one hundred, the lowest being 15. And in those seats every vote did count. A devious but smart ploy then, conferring a small but potentially significant advantage on the Conservative Party? It didn’t help much: they suffered their worst election defeat in modern times in the 2024 general election.

But if the charge sheet against the Conservatives 2022 Elections Act is damning, what of Labour’s plans set out in its July strategy paper and, in particular, lowering the voting age to 16? Always measured, the last Conservative leader Rishi Sunak said it would be “electorally helpful” to Labour and, always more strident, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage accused Labour of trying to “rig future elections”.

In stark contrast, the (then) Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner and the (then) elections minister Rushanara Ali, in their introduction to Labour’s strategy document, ignored any suggestion of bias and claimed high-minded principle guided the government’s thinking, “The right to participate in our democracy is a defining aspect of our national Identity…over the centuries, stretching back to the Magna Carta, men and women have struggled long and hard for the right to vote. We remember the efforts of the Chartists, the Suffragettes and others in their fight to advance and widen participation in our democracy…The world is changing but our political system has not kept pace.”

Surely young people mature earlier and earlier and votes at 16 is just catching up with the rest of that “changing world”. The evidence, however, would suggest otherwise. Out of 237 countries and territories listed by UNICEF as conducting elections, 13 allow votes at 16 in all elections but of those 13, four are Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and East Timor. If they are discounted the nine remaining countries represent a percentage of 3.8%. And those nine include such beacons of democracy as North Korea, Cuba and Nicaragua. The only European country allowing votes at 16 in all elections is Austria, while in Greece it is 17. Votes at 16 seems to be an outlier. Some countries in Europe, Belgium and Germany, do allow voting at 16 in some elections (European, local and regional), and they are now joined by Scotland and Wales. Both those home nations stumbled into lowering the voting age through the complex arrangements of their devolved assemblies; Scotland in time for the Independence Referendum in 2014 and in Wales for the Senned elections in 2021.

The arguments for and against votes at 16 illustrate how un-clear cut the issue is: government ministers argue that “young people, who already contribute to society by working, paying taxes and serving in the military (enlisting), will be given the right to vote on the issues that affect them”, while the Conservative shadow minister asked how a “16-year-old can vote but not be allowed to buy a lottery ticket, an alcoholic drink, marry, or go to war (active service), or even stand in the elections they’re voting in?…” (he forgot to mention getting a tattoo)…“isn’t the Government’s position on the age of majority just hopelessly confused?” He has a point on the question of the minimum age of candidates; the government is, unusually, happy to follow the devolved nations – “The minimum age to stand as a candidate will remain at 18, mirroring the approach taken by the governments of Scotland and Wales and ensuring consistent approaches to both voting and candidacy across the whole UK”.

The government’s hopes that “…by engaging voters early, when they are young, and allowing them to have a say in shaping their future, we will build the foundations for their lifelong participation in our electoral processes…” and here the little evidence we have is supportive. In the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum turnout amongst 16 and 17 year olds was more than twenty points higher than 18-24 year olds, 75% to 54% (although both were below the sky-high overall turnout of 84.6%, the highest turnout in any UK election since the 1910 general election). Even better was the conclusion from university research in 2023 that showed that 16 and 17 year olds “continued to turn out in higher numbers, even into their twenties, than young people who attained the right to vote later, at age 18”.

But if there are attempts by Labour to manipulate the voting system for party political advantage, how successful are they likely to be? Are all those 16 and 17 year-olds going to keep the party in power? Numerically, they could make a real difference, there are 1.6 million of them and in the 2024 general election there were 120 seats (18%) where the number of 16 and 17 year-olds was greater than the size of the majority. However, the eminent academic David Runciman introduces a note of appropriate caution “no-one should assume they know how young people are going to vote—the point of any democracy worthy of the name is that it should be unpredictable”. Because it has hardly ever happened before there is an absence of data and, consequently, little research into how 16 and 17 year olds are likely to vote but Liberal Democrats, Greens, nationalists and smaller left splinter parties must all be confident of claiming a share and even Nigel Farage is making claims about them cleaving to his Reform UK Party. But hope is not completely lost for the traditional main parties; the predominantly young audience at the Glastonbury pop festival stage recently cheered a leader of the Labour Party trying to mobilise a “youthquake”. However, in the subsequent general election his party slumped to its worst election defeat since the 1930s. That was Jeremy Corbyn. He is not in the Labour Party any more and is setting up his own rival left splinter party.

Do the heavens look down kindly on those who seek to better their party’s fortunes by interfering in elections? It is only a couple of months since Angela Rayner and Rushanara Ali launched their party’s Elections Strategy and in that short time both have been forced to resign. That may be coincidence but the current polling would suggest that it is going to take more than the votes of a few 16 and 17 year-olds to turn round the dire electoral prospects for Keir Starmer’s party.

But will the research that showed young people continuing to vote help turn around falling public engagement in politics? Turnout in the modern era was highest in the 1950 general election when it reached 83.9%. With some ups and downs, it has been falling steadily since, dropping to 59.7% in 2024. The marginality of a seat is an important determinant (of the 20 seats with the highest turnout in the 2024, 15 changed hands, the highest turnout being 75.2%) but the general trend downward in turnout is clear. Only time will tell whether those 16 and 17 year-olds will stick with the voting habit and help bring turnout back up to its 1950s levels.

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