Clause 20 - Minimum age
Electoral Administration Bill
4:30 pm
David Heath (Shadow Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs & Shadow Leader of the House, Law Officers (Constitutional Affairs); Somerton and Frome, Liberal Democrat)
Strictly speaking, that is the state of the law. I have just read out part of the 1695 Act, which is the current state of the law. It clearly says that someone may not be elected unless they have reached ''one and twenty yeares''. Currently, one has to be 21 to be a Member of Parliament, but the Government propose that that age should be 18. All we are considering is the date on which that applies, but the date is construed differently for different elections. There was a dispute in the European parliamentary elections about whether the nomination of a candidate whose 18th birthday fell between the point of nomination and the point of election was valid.
Different rules apply to different elections in what we expect to be a common electoral process. My question is simply this: does the Under-Secretary agree that it would be better to decide what the relevant date for these purposes will be and better for the date to be consistent throughout legislation and across elections? It is not consistent at the moment, so will the Under-Secretary explain why not?