Scotland Act 1998 (Modification of Schedules 4 and 5 and Transfer of Functions to the Scottish Ministers etc.) Order 2015 — House of Lords, 2015-02-26
Topic: Civil Rights
Ian Bruce Lang (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble and learned friend for setting out the arguments which the Government advance on behalf of this order. I am not entirely persuaded by the force of those arguments and I shall come to that in the course of my speech. However, the main thrust of what I will address is the constitutional aspect of bringing forward this measure in an order of this kind. My noble and learned friend referred to the fact that several Section 30 orders have been used. That does not, in itself, make it right. What matters is the content of the orders and the circumstances in which they are presented. I am concerned partly with the substance of what is proposed but mainly with the procedures from which the order has emerged. Your Lordship’s Constitution Committee is conducting an inquiry and will in due course publish a report on the draft clauses published to enact the recommendations of the Smith commission. As my noble and learned friend said, the policy enshrined in this order has been brought forward in advance of that so we have issued a short report on it which we published at the start of this week in the hope of assisting the debate. I say in passing that haste is the hallmark of bad law in matters constitutional. This whole process has been redolent of haste Our first concern has been the failure of the Government directly to address the constitutional implications of this proposal—or, indeed, the draft clauses to implement the whole of the Smith commission’s recommendations—either in a Command Paper or in the draft Explanatory Memorandum for the order. The changes to the voting age in Scotland have no direct effect on the franchise of other UK elections, as my noble and learned friend said, but there are clear indications that they set a trend. The Wales Act 2014 provides for the reduction of the voting age to 16 in any referendum on tax-raising powers for the Welsh Assembly. In evidence to our committee, the Secretary of State for Scotland said he thought it "unthinkable" that the franchise for the UK general election of 2020 would not include 16 and 17 year-olds. What a contrast that slide towards a new policy across the United Kingdom is to the procedure followed in the late 1960s, when the age was reduced from the age of 21 to 18 only after two separate commissions had reported, one into electoral law and the other into the age of majority. Consider the contrast also with the Republic of Ireland, where a constitutional convention discussed the issue in 2013. A referendum on whether there should be a reduction to the age of 16 is to be held This change in the voting age is highly unusual, looked at across the globe. Internationally, 171 countries have a voting age of 18. Three have an age of 17: Indonesia, Sudan and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Four have 16: Brazil, Austria, Nicaragua and Cuba. One, Iran, has 15. A larger handful, including Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan and Tonga, have ages around the 20 to 21 mark. We in the United Kingdom propose to enable Scotland to do this without adequate recent consultations, with no White Paper or debate in Parliament, just an unamendable piece of secondary legislation which prevents effective scrutiny. I do not think that that is an appropriate way to proceed with constitutional legislation of this kind—legislation, be it noted, that goes beyond the Smith commission recommendations, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth pointed out, by including local government elections as well as Scottish Parliament elections. Again, there has been no consultation on that or proper parliamentary consideration One of the proposals that I do welcome in the draft clauses, to which my noble friend Lord Forsyth again referred and which are not before us today, is draft Clause 4, which will provide that future change to electoral law in Scotland will need a two-thirds majority in the Scottish Parliament. That is an important point of principle which I welcome, but if that is to be introduced shortly, why not now, for this significant change to the voting age being proposed? It really is not good enough simply to say, "Because it was in the Smith commission proposals". Those proposals were not the basis of parliamentary consideration either. We will now be presented with draft clauses, which have not yet had any scrutiny whatever.