Votes for teens

It's been tried for the EU Referendum Bill, there's a precedent from the Scottish referendum, and now another new front in the battle for votes at 16 has just been opened.

Next Monday's Lords committee stage debate on the City Devolution Bill will include a Lab-Lib amendment calling for the voting age to be lowered in elections for the proposed new Metro mayors…. and all council elections.

I suspect we're now going to see this kind of amendment attached to just about every possible bill.

Lords Tyler and Shipley (Lib Dems) and Mackenzie of Luton and Kennedy of Southwark (Lab) have this amendment down for debate:

"48

Insert the following new Clause—

"Governance arrangements for local government: entitlement to vote

In section 2 of the Representation of People's Act 1983 (local government

electors), in subsection (1)(d) for "18" substitute "16"."

This is actually quite crafty: because the bill's long title refers to "make provision about local authority governance", and the proposers use a similar phrase for their amendment (Amdt 48), so the clerks could not limit it to elections for metro mayors - and so it would make 16 and 17-year-olds eligible to vote in all local elections.

Labour are most definitely not on board for another amendment from the Tyler-Shipley axis (Amdt 47) which uses the same "in" to call for local elections to be conducted by the single transferable vote system of PR.

It will be interesting to see whether this garners support beyond the ranks of the Lib Dems.