British MPs have overturned an amendment from the House of Lords that would have allowed 16- and 17 year-olds to vote in the forthcoming referendum on EU membership. The Conservative government feared that extending the franchise would have delayed the referendum to allow for an estimated 1.5 million names to be added to the register.
Cabinet office minister John Penrose told MPs that even if the government favoured lowering the voting age, the Lords amendment was the wrong way to do it. "Changing the voting age is not something which should be applied to a single vote, or even perhaps a special one, if it is as important as this referendum," Mr Penrose said. "It is something which should be considered for all elections, collectively and in the round.
“Equally, given the understandable sensitivities surrounding the EU referendum making such a fundamental change to the franchise for this vote alone but not for others would inevitably and perhaps justifiably lead to accusations of trying to fix the franchise in favour of either the remain or the leave campaign.”
Younger voters are the most enthusiastic about Britain remaining in the EU and with polls tightening, the votes of 16 and 17 year-olds could have had a significant impact. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party favoured extending the franchise and opposition MPs criticised the mechanism the government used to kill the Lords’ amendment.
In the case of most Bills, a Commons’s rejection of a Lords’s amendment would trigger a game of constitutional ping pong, with the legislation being batted back and forth between the chambers, possibly ending in the Lords delaying the legislation. The government argued that the referendum voting age amendment was “financial” in nature, because the change would cost £6 million, thus the prerogative of the Commons.
The government's victory came as David Cameron came under pressure from within his cabinet to hold firm in his demand that EU migrants should have to wait for four years before claiming in-work benefits in Britain. European Council president Donald Tusk his week identified the issue as the most contentious in Britain's EU negotiations.
Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith said, however, that most other European government supported curbs on welfare for migrants. "When I talk to ministers in Europe, I have yet to come across one person who does not agree there is something fundamentally wrong with this system that people can arrive in a different country and be eligible for benefits they have never contributed towards," he said. "This is as much an issue in Bavaria as Birmingham."
Stressing that the demand was also a Conservative manifesto commitment, Mr Duncan Smith invoked the success of Margaret Thatcher in winning concessions in EU negotiations that many had said were impossible.
Sir Stephen Nickell, an economist at the Office for Budget Responsibility, told the treasury select committee on Tuesday that the proposed changes to the rules on benefits were "unlikely to have a huge impact" on the number of EU migrants coming to the United Kingdom.
