Giving 16-year-olds the vote: Will it beat far-right populism or does it play right into Farage's hands?

Lowering the voting age to 16 could “guard against surging populism”, experts have said – though left-wingers cannot take the youth vote “for granted”.

16-year-olds can already work, pay tax and join the army. By the next general election, they will also gain the right to vote.

The “seismic change” – announced by the government today (17 July) – comes alongside a series of other electoral reforms, including cracking down on voter interference, automatically registering people to vote and extending voter ID to include bank and veterans’ cards.

“For too long public trust in our democracy has been damaged and faith in our institutions has been allowed to decline,” said deputy prime minister Angela Rayner.      

“We are taking action to break down barriers to participation that will ensure more people have the opportunity to engage in UK democracy.”

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Experts have welcomed the move, Rachael Henry, head of advocacy at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), described it as a “hugely positive announcement”.

“Enabling 1.5 million 16- and 17-year-olds to vote is a brilliant reform,” she told Big Issue.

“Electoral reform can often feel not like the government’s immediate priority, but with rising populism and turnout really waning, disengagement is a huge threat. When people don’t feel engaged with it they move away from the mainstream.

“Engaging people in the electoral system young can stop that from happening… bringing younger people on board is a big part of that.”

But how will young people vote – and how will politicians try and court them? Let’s dive into the detail.

How do young people and old people vote?

Folk wisdom has long held that people become more politically conservative as they grow older.

While this has been contested, age is certainly a significant dividing line at the ballot box.

For every 10 years older a voter is, their chance of voting Tory increases by around nine points, while the chance of them voting Labour decreases by eight points.

At the 2024 election, the Conservatives polled at 43% among over 65s – and just 8% among under 30s. For Labour, the inverse was true – the party polled at 41% among 18–24-year-olds (and 45% among 25–29-year-olds). This halved among voters aged 70 and above.   

Right-wing media and politicians have accused Labour of a bid to “rig the next election”.

Conservative shadow communities minister Paul Holmes described it as a “brazen attempt” by a party whose “unpopularity is scaring them into making major constitutional changes without consultation”.

Experts are less sure.

“I think that characterisation of it being political calculus is not necessarily fair,” says Henry.

“We’re actually looking at quite a volatile landscape for young people’s voting preferences… it’s not necessarily this ‘slam dunk’ for the left, and I think the government are doing it because increasing franchise is the right thing to do.”

Young people do, as you might expect, have higher levels of support for the Greens. Among the 18-24 demographic, 18% support the left-wing party – the highest proportion of any age group.

At the same time, recent polling shows that roughly 16% of 18–25-year-olds plan to vote for Reform UK. Of today’s announcement, Nigel Farage said: “It’s an attempt to rig the political system but we intend to give them a nasty surprise.”

“I don’t think we can make any judgements on what today’s announcement means for say, Reform UK,” says Brake. “Some of the far-right parties do quite well among the youth demographic. Some of the most effective TikTokers are from the far-right.”

Will votes for young people change British politics?

Regardless, the announcement could offset one of the most significant threats to British democracy: apathy.

Since 1997, the UK general election turnout rate for those aged 65 and above has consistently been at least 20 percentage points higher than for those aged 18-24 years.

This can skew policymaking in favour of the older generation. Consider Rishi Sunak’s election pitch: triple lock assurances for pensioners, national service for young people.

But shifting the voting age downward could help counter apathy, by pairing newfound democratic rights with civic education in schools.

“The impact in Scotland and Wales (where the voting age is already 16) is that 16- and 17-year-olds tend to vote in higher numbers than their slightly older counterparts, and they tend to continue to vote,” Brake said.

“So it should have a positive impact, in terms of building engagement with young people and helping to offset apathy.”

Shout Out UK is an organisation that runs programmes on political and media literacy.

A “well-resourced political and media literacy” curriculum would be a valuable complement to the voting reforms, founder Matteo Bergamini MBE said.

“If we’re going to do this [changing the voting age], we need to also have media literacy in there,” he told Big Issue. “Properly resourced, with teachers being given the support they need to actually deliver this work so that young people and future generations, not just the generation we’re talking about now, have the critical thinking skills and emotional resilience to understand fact from fiction.

Shout Out UK recently worked with the University of Sheffield to survey 3000 teachers on this topic. Although educators overwhelmingly believed that they had a duty to deliver media literacy training, less than 1% said that they had the skills, the tools, confidence, to deliver it.

“It’s not just about giving them [16- and 17-year-olds] the opportunity to have a say in their democracy,” Bergamini said. “That’s like half the work. We then need to also make sure that they understand that democracy, they have the tools to engage with that democracy, and they know what their civic and democratic rights are.”

Hopefully, the reforms will also mean that politicians of all stripes have to think more seriously about their appeal among young voters.

“We could definitely see a shift in policy,” says Brake. “16- and 17-year-olds have a different set of interests. Education issues, where am I going to live, renting and housing issues. It should mean that the political agenda move downwards and reflects a broader swathe of the public.”

Experts have welcomed the other reforms too.

The Electoral Commission found that 4% of non-voters at the 2024 general election cited a lack of voter ID was a key reason they didn’t vote, equating to around three quarters of a million people across Great Britain.  

The Electoral Reform Society has called on the government to scrap the requirement for voter ID entirely – but adding bank cards to acceptable forms of voter ID is a good start.

Automatic voter registration could enfranchise up to eight million more people, Henry said – often from the least politically engaged demographics.

“France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Denmark, Spain, Sweden and 24 other liberal democracies use a form of automated voter registration. So that is basically a system where citizens are just directly enrolled onto the electoral register. You don’t need to bother with the faff of filling out a form.

“This will be a huge shift, and is really what we need at a time when we’ve got so many people thinking that the political system doesn’t work for them and that they don’t have any connection to politics anymore.”

Plans to restrict foreign donations were also well received. They would, for example, stop Elon Musk donating £100 million to a political party through a UK shell company that does not actually trade here.

“It is encouraging to see the government is tightening up rules around political donations,” said Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society. “It is important that loopholes are closed so that foreign funds cannot distort our politics.”

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