A growing number of Conservatives now back votes for 16-year-olds, with senior Tories predicting that the party could change its stance on younger voters before the next election.

Senior Conservative backbencher Sir Peter Bottomley said it was a “question of when rather than if” the party would eventually back the policy.

Other former ministers have also suggested the Conservatives should change their attitude towards lowering the voting age, including two former education secretaries – Justine Greening and Nicky Morgan.

Bottomley said the policy had enough support from the Tory backbenches to pass through parliament. “I think it would probably carry. Labour would vote in favour of it, so would every minority party, and a growing number of Conservatives support it,” he told the Evening Standard.

George Osborne, the former chancellor who now edits the Evening Standard, suggested he too was in favour. “More Tory MPs now support votes for 16yr olds,” he tweeted.

“By my count, [government] now doesn’t have a majority to stop it. Choice: lose in Commons, 16yr olds get vote and Tories lose even more support of young people; or back votes at 16 and get some credit for major social reform. Hmmm. Tough one.”

Writing on ConservativeHome website recently, Morgan said she would back a private member’s bill tabled by Labour MP Peter Kyle to lower the voting age to 16, saying those who were denied a vote at the EU referendum were “furious that their futures have been decided by those aged over 70”.



“Embracing votes at 16 would demonstrate to the next generation that the Conservative party has something to offer them,” she said. “Just as the Conservatives both delivered on and then fulfilled votes for women, it is time for us to take the next pragmatic leap forward and get on with votes at 16.”

Greening, who left her education secretary role last month, said Theresa May should consider endorsing votes for 16-year-olds as a way of bringing younger people back onside.

“I don’t think it’s an argument that should be dismissed at all,” she told the Sunday Times. “I got to vote one or two days after I was 18 in 1987. Was I too immature to have voted three days before when I was 17? Probably not.”

Labour’s manifesto backed lowering the voting age from 18 to 16 but the Cabinet Office secretary, David Lidington, told the House of Commons last week the government was not in favour of a change.

“The age of 18 rather than 16 is widely recognised as the age at which one becomes an adult,” Lidington said, responding to a question from Labour’s Emily Thornberry.

“The situation here, with the national voting age at 18, is one that is followed by 26 out of the 27 other members of the EU and by the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Unless she is going to denounce all of those countries as somehow inadequate by her own particular standards, she ought to grow up and treat this subject with greater seriousness.”

Cat Smith MP, Labour’s shadow minister for voter engagement and youth affairs, said: “Votes at 16 is the right thing to do and George Osborne has admitted that an increasing number of Tory MPs know it.

“The only thing stopping them doing the right thing is their own narrow political interests. For once, the Tories should stop thinking of themselves, do the right thing and give young people the vote.”