Votes at 16 is not the only unresolved question about who should be entitled to vote. Three groups remain excluded, or partially excluded, from the UK franchise, each involving different arguments.
| Group | Current rule | Case for retaining the barrier | Case for removing it |
| Prisoners | A blanket ban on all serving prisoners voting, under section 3 of the Representation of the People Act 1983. | Losing the vote is a proportionate part of the punishment for serious crime, and Parliament, not the courts, should decide who forfeits it. | The European Court of Human Rights ruled the blanket ban unlawful in Hirst v United Kingdom (No. 2) (2005); a proportionate approach could restrict voting only for the most serious offences. |
| Foreign nationals | British, Irish and qualifying Commonwealth citizens can vote in UK general elections; most other foreign nationals cannot, though Scotland and Wales let any legally resident foreign national vote in devolved and local elections. | The vote is a right of national citizenship; only citizens are bound long-term by the laws a Parliament makes. | Long-term resident non-citizens pay tax and are subject to UK law, so, by the same logic used for 16 year olds, arguably deserve a say. |
| Under-16s | No mainstream proposal to extend the vote below 16; the Representation of the People Bill 2026 stops at 16. | A minimum age reflects a judgement about developing political understanding and independence from parental influence, which has to be drawn somewhere. | Some reform advocates argue any age cut-off is arbitrary, though this position remains a minority one even within the votes at 16 campaign. |
Sources: House of Commons Library (prisoners’ voting rights, CBP-7461); Electoral Commission; Migration Observatory, University of Oxford.
The prisoner voting question shows how these debates can outlast their formal legal resolution.
After Hirst, the UK Government resisted change for over a decade; a 2017 administrative compromise, allowing prisoners released on temporary licence to vote, was accepted by the Council of Europe as sufficient in 2018, but the blanket ban for prisoners in custody remains.
This suggests that where an excluded group has little direct political power (unlike, for example, 16 and 17 year olds, whose case is now championed by the Government itself), reform can stall even after a barrier has been found unlawful.
| Check your understanding 1. Explain the outcome of Hirst v United Kingdom (No. 2) and why the UK’s response to it took over a decade. (Explain, about 100-120 words: state what the ECtHR actually ruled, then explain the political reasons for the delay and describe the 2017 compromise.) 2. ‘Barriers to the franchise for prisoners and foreign nationals are simply inconsistent with the arguments used for votes at 16.’ Evaluate this claim. (Evaluate, about 200-250 words: line up the reasoning used for each group side by side, taxation, citizenship, capacity, then judge whether the logic really is inconsistent or whether there are genuine differences between the cases.) |