Ministers are to spend £2.8 million building the computer systems for votes at 16 and 17 before Parliament has approved the law that would lower the voting age.
The money will come from the Contingencies Fund, which Treasury rules say may be used only for urgent spending in the public interest, and where ‘political imperative is not enough’.
In a written statement to MPs on Thursday, Florence Eshalomi, the Minister of State for Homelessness, Democracy, Communities and Faith, said her department would seek Treasury approval for ‘advance expenditure totalling £2,800,000’.
The Representation of the People Bill, which would extend the vote to 16 and 17 year olds for general elections, Northern Ireland Assembly elections and local elections in England and Northern Ireland, is ‘currently before Parliament’. The Government expects it to receive Royal Assent by spring 2027.
The Bill was introduced in February and reintroduced in May. It is now at committee stage in the House of Lords, where peers are still going through it line by line.
The Electoral Commission estimates the change would add around 1.7 million voters. The Bill also covers voter identification, including plans to accept bank cards at polling stations, and new rules on political donations.
The £2.8 million will pay for a ‘secure service enabling eligible young people to register to vote using data held by the Department for Education as part of appropriate identity checks’. It will also fund electoral management systems, a public-facing service and a portal for the council officers who keep the electoral register.
The minister said that waiting for Royal Assent ‘would compress delivery timescales and increase the risk of delays to implementation’.
Under the Treasury’s rulebook, Managing Public Money, most significant new policies need primary legislation to receive Royal Assent ‘before any expenditure on delivery of the policy’. Limited early work is possible only with borrowing from the Contingencies Fund, which the Treasury controls.
The conditions are strict. The spending ‘must be urgent and in the public interest’, with benefits that outweigh ‘the convention of awaiting Parliamentary authority’. The rules add that ‘political imperative is not enough’.
The Bill has passed its second reading in the Commons, as the rules require. But they also say the legislation must be ‘certain, or virtually certain, to pass into law with no substantive change in the near future, and usually within the financial year’. The Government’s own estimate of spring 2027 could fall after that year ends on 31 March.
Advances of this kind are unusual. The Contingencies Fund’s accounts show that advances for new services which could not wait for both the enabling law and the spending approval totalled £8 million in 2025-26 and £1.2 million in 2024-25.
The statement is also unclear on the money. It says the funding ‘has already been provided’ in the department’s Spending Review settlement and ‘does not represent new or additional spending’. Later in the same statement it says Parliament will be asked to approve ‘additional capital of £2,800,000 for this new service’.
Electoral administrators have flagged the issue. In written evidence to MPs in March, the Electoral Management Board for Scotland said ‘consideration will also need to be given to the ID verification process’, ensuring that ‘any data sets that are required to be used are appropriate for young electors’. The statement does not say which Department for Education records will be used.
Votes at 16 was in Labour’s manifesto, and 16 and 17 year olds already vote in Scottish Parliament and Senedd elections. The advance is repayable, and the minister has told Parliament about it, as the rules require.
But Labour is the Government, and this is its decision. Ministers now need to explain what makes building the system so urgent that it cannot wait for Parliament, which Department for Education records will be used to check young people’s identities, and whether the £2.8 million is new money or not.
Parliament will be asked to approve the £2.8 million only afterwards, in a Supplementary Estimate.
Main image: a polling station sign at Shepherd’s Bush Green, London, on 3 July 2024. File photo. Matt Brown, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped.
