Young people and voting

The Cabinet Office has announced that five national organisations and every local authority in Great Britain will share £4.2million funding aimed at ensuring everyone in the country is signed up to the electoral register and has their chance to vote.

UK Youth and the Scottish Youth Parliament will deliver programmes to support young people to vote. Funding is also being allocated to local authorities to boost their efforts to get as many people as possible onto the electoral register.

For further information visit www.gov.uk/government/news/funding-for-new-ways-to-encourage-voter-registration.

In addition, vInspired has published research on young people and voting. Of the young people surveyed:

• 80 percent said they care about key issues but did not feel represented in politics;
• 57 percent had campaigned on at least two issues in the three years since the last election; and
• 69 percent disagreed with the view of comedian Russell Brand, who controversially encouraged people to abstain from voting in order to get the attention of politicians, but 78 percent do agree with him that the current political system doesn't represent their generation's needs.

The Independent has published the results of a ComRes survey around young people and voter registration, which found that:

• 24 percent of 18 to 21 year olds have never registered and nine percent did not know whether they were on the register; and
• Seven percent of 22 to 25 year olds have never registered and eight percent did not know whether they had were on the register

This suggests up to 800,000 young people are missing from the electoral register.