Oral evidence: Voter engagement in the UK, HC 232Thursday 19 June 2014
Oral evidence, 19 June 2014.
Witnesses
Damian Lyons Lowe, Chief Executive, Survation, Patrick Brione, Director of Research, Survation and Fran O’Leary, Director of Strategy and Innovation, Lodestone, gave evidence.
Chair
We are going to move on now to our next set of witnesses, and that is Damian and Fran. Damian Lyons Lowe, Chief Exec from Survation. Damian will be joined this morning by Patrick Brione, Director of Research—I hope I have pronounced that well, Patrick—and Fran O’Leary, Director of Strategy and Innovation at Lodestone. Would you like to say anything to start us off or are you happy to start straight into questions with Paul?
Fran O’Leary
I would like to kick off if that is okay.
Chair
Please do, Fran.
Fran O’Leary
First, I would like to thank the Committee for inviting us to come today.
Chair
You are very welcome.
Fran O’Leary
I think it is a real privilege to get to come and hear what you are interested in and hopefully help. Secondly, I would like to commend the Committee on looking at this area. I think it is one of the biggest and most difficult issues to grapple with in politics and in democracy today. Thirdly, I would also like to commend the extensive work that I have seen that Chris has done over time to interrogate this issue and look at it from a whole range of different angles. I have tracked his work over time. Fundamentally, the reason why we are here is that when I returned from helping the Democrats in Las Vegas in 2012, where they had a huge success in increasing voter registration and turnout, I began looking at why people don’t vote. When I came back to the UK I was struck by the fact that the majority of the people that I know don’t vote, and it hammered home. I became curious about why that was when we had had the same education and grown up in similar ways with the same values. That is the kind of outcome that is there. I began doing Google surveys doing Facebook ads to try to reach the unreachable people who Sue was talking about earlier, and found that it was incredibly easy to reach them and find out what they were thinking. So my company Lodestone commissioned Survation, who are a polling company, to conduct the Lodestone political survey, which was a major review of what voters and non-voters think. We also benefited from the analysis of Stuart Fox from the University of Nottingham, who has looked at our research in detail—and I hope to cover some of his points today—and also through engagement with Gurchetan Grewal at the University of Birmingham. We found that many, many non-voters share the same great British dream that voters have and that they are very similar in a lot of ways, which is one reason why Lodestone recommends that at every point when voters engage with the council they should be invited to register to vote, basically as a more efficient common-sense approach to voter registration, where it is just more of the part of the mechanics of government on a daily basis. Secondly, one of the striking things we found was that the majority of voters, the majority of non-voters, and the majority of young non-voters all said that they would be more likely to vote if they could vote online. We think this is a statistic that should not be ignored, and we believe that there should be closer interaction between Government, industry and academics to ensure that any internet voting systems that are developed are safe, secure and economical. Indeed, I believe there probably should be further trials on this in future given the pace of change and development within technology. It is incredible, and we benefit from having some of the leading academics and leading technologists in this country. I would like to hand over to Survation just to outline their part in this process.
Damian Lyons Lowe
Survation is a market research political polling company with a particular focus on political and social research. Going back to Fran’s original point about how you reach the unreachable, where do we get these people from? We are consistently polling members of the public. We do something like 1,000 interviews with different individuals over the course of a year. We have vast amounts of data on people who tell us that they don’t vote, in this case defined by not voting in 2010. So for Lodestone we were able to do what is called a re-contact study, where we could re-contact the database of declared non-voters and double confirm that they were, indeed, being not disingenuous in the first place. We then took 1,000 of those non-voters and 1,000 voters and looked at the different characteristics and trends between the two groups. Generally the panels that we draw respondents from are large and unbranded. They are not political. The respondents are paid a small cash incentive to answer polling questions. There are a lot of people who are not interested in politics and they are well represented on these panels. They are typically doing surveys comparing brands of cereal or washing powder. These are not politically engaged people. So we think we managed to find these hard-to-reach people using that method. If there are any questions about the survey methodology, Patrick might give us some information, or do you want to ask questions?
Chair
We will press on.
Paul Flynn
Ms O’Leary, did your research convince you that we need to change the system or do you need to acquire a new circle of friends if they don’t vote?
Fran O’Leary
That is a tough question. It convinced me, first, that more research should be done; secondly that the majority of non-voters who we have come across are not strange beasts who never engage with society or do not engage with their neighbours, a different breed, and that many of the values policy areas and beliefs that they hold are incredibly similar to those of voters. The thing I was struck by, both since publishing the research and publishing several articles, was the number of people I have spoken to who have said they don’t really know how to get on the register. That is not because they are not enthused about the world, it is that they do not know about the system and I think we should do more.
Paul Flynn
Are they Russell Brand groupies, these friends of yours?
Fran O’Leary
It is right to say that some of the people surveyed did say, when we asked them who they would like politicians to be more like, they would like politicians to be more like Russell Brand but the person—
Chair
Be careful what you wish for.
Fran O’Leary
Absolutely; absolutely. The person more people referred to was Richard Branson, and I would not categorise the majority of the people who we have surveyed who are non-voters as people who are Russell Brand groupies at all. They are much more like everyone else in your constituencies, the sort of thing you would expect.
Paul Flynn
Do you think it would be beneficial to have people on the electoral roll deciding the choice of who runs the country, who have so little interest or understanding of serious affairs generally?
Fran O’Leary
I think it is wrong to categorise them as people who have little interest in the running of the country. From the verbatim responses, we have definitely seen that they are very interested in issues like how their kids are schooled, or making sure that they have access to more housing, concerns about debt—things that Parliament deals with. For some reason there is a disconnect between the two, but I would not say they should not have a vote, absolutely not.
Paul Flynn
We are trying to get Mr Brand along. It has been suggested that he come along to talk to us because I would like to greet him as a fellow campaigner to legalise drugs. In my case I have been campaigning since before he was born. But to tie this up with his contradictory advice that he wants to change things but you don’t vote. What we see is a Government who are obsessively interested in elderly, rich people, like me, who have a great many undeserved benefits and young people are constantly being punished by having their vanishing benefits cut. Isn’t that a consequence? People of your generation and this inert group of sad friends you have, why be angry?
Fran O’Leary
I feel that is a very sad picture but on that front I would like to refer to some of the research that Stuart Fox at the University of Nottingham did on younger people who are non-voters.
Damian Lyons Lowe
From the data set.
Fran O’Leary
He found both with the voters and non-voters within the younger end that one of the barriers to voting was they said they did not feel that they had enough information or understanding. I think that is an issue that all of us involved in this kind of thing have to address. Secondly, one of the points he pulled out was that their media engagement is slightly different to those of older people, and the role of Facebook in campaigning should not be underestimated or underused as a tool. Facebook and the family were important to them whereas traditional newspapers less so. I think everyone in politics can learn from that.
Paul Flynn
We were outgunned on this because Russell Brand has 7 million followers, which is even more than members of this Committee have. We have a few thousand followers. In the whole of the political set very few political figures have more than a few thousand followers. Do you think there a lesson in there, with the result of your research suggesting that we should be more engaged in social media?
Fran O’Leary
I absolutely do but I also think it is about both what content we share on social media and which channels we use. When we looked at Facebook and Twitter, for younger people within that breakdown Facebook was a bigger source of political news— however you define political news to them—than Twitter was. Anecdotally, I know a lot of politicians who concentrate far more on Twitter than on Facebook. I would say that if you want to engage with younger voters it is probably worth focusing on both.
Paul Flynn
Thank you.
Chair
Thanks, Paul. I will move from Russell Brand’s press agent to Tracey.
Tracey Crouch
Who has 9,000 followers on Twitter.
Chair
And growing.
Tracey Crouch
And growing. I will start by asking you about the survey and its methodology if I may. One of the problems that we have faced throughout this inquiry is reaching people who are not politically engaged and to find out why they don’t vote. How were you able to reach such a large number of non-voters?
Patrick Brione
To pick up on the point that Damian raised earlier about how we conducted the survey; the survey was split into two parts. So we had a sample of voters who obviously are people that normally answer surveys about voting intention and so on. Then we had a sample of non-voters. The non-voters sample we managed to select by going back to people that we had already spoken to over the preceding year, who had filled in surveys on a range of topics, many political, some not political. We draw these people from online panels, where they have basically signed up to do surveys and they are paid a small amount of money for five or 10 minutes of their time on each occasion. Because most of the surveys that people are offered on these sites are not political in their nature—they are more about commercial branding, less political issues than we would normally expect in political opinion polls—there is no reason why politically disengaged people would not be present in equal numbers to politically engaged people in these groups.
Tracey Crouch
So it is a representative sample in other words?
Patrick Brione
It is a representative sample in that sense.
Damian Lyons Lowe
Yes, and you might want to mention, for example, the weighting procedure that you went through.
Patrick Brione
We drew a sample of non-voters and a sample of voters. Then we weighted the overall sample to be nationally representative by age, by gender, by region of the UK and also by income. So we made sure that there was a correct number of low-income groups in there who we know are much more likely to be non-voters than people of high-income groups. In that sense, the respondents were representative of the UK and included that very large number of people that did not vote. The way that we drew them into the survey was that we didn’t make it about politics to start with. There was no mention of voting or politics in the introductory text or in the email invitation that was sent to them. The initial questions in the survey were all about very general topics. So we started the survey in a very soft manner. We asked people about their hopes for the future, about where they got their news from—general questions like that—and then we only got into whether they vote and why they don’t vote, if they don’t vote, later on in the survey once they were already engaged with it. In that sense we would think that we have managed to capture and retain the number of non-voters that we were looking for.
Tracey Crouch
Included in that survey were people who were either too young to vote or ineligible to vote, and therefore it is unsurprising that they are non-voters because they are unable to vote. So I am interested as to why that is therefore included within the results of the survey.
Damian Lyons Lowe
We have broken that out for you.
Patrick Brione
The sample does include some people who were too young to vote in 2010. I have looked at the actual data: there were 88 such respondents out of the 1,020 people that didn’t vote in the last election; 88 of them were too young or gave “too young” as their reason for not voting. That is 8.6% of the non-voters’ sample. Had these voters been old enough, based on the actual turnout rates at the last general election it is estimated that only 44% of them would have voted anyway. That figure comes from work that Ipsos Mori did, around the time of the last general election, on differential turnout among different demographics. They were included in the survey largely because we thought it would be interesting to include them, to look at the views of people with probably more than a 50% chance that they were going to turn out to be non-voters next time. Therefore, we thought their views would be of interest in looking at how to engage these people to make sure that they do vote for the 2015 general election.
Fran O’Leary
It is probably worth adding that when we analysed the data for people who did not vote in 2010, and who say they would not vote if there was an election tomorrow, and who also say they haven’t voted in a local council or European election—so just those people, the absolute, absolute non-voters who at that point I might expect them to say some things that are slightly more Russell Brand-ish—their data on pretty much every point mirrored that of people who did not vote in 2010.
Patrick Brione
A very large proportion of the people that were non-voters, in that they had not voted in the last election or who said they would not vote in the next election—I think 54% of them—over half of those 1,020 non-voters said they had never voted in a general election, including 23% of those aged 55-plus. They must have missed at least eight general elections consecutively. So these are people that are very, very persistent non-voters many of them.
Tracey Crouch
Minus the 88 too young or ineligible, did your survey ask whether or not the non-voters were registered to vote?
Damian Lyons Lowe
No, we did not ask that question. It is a very interesting area to explore in future surveys. We looked at this. Ros Baston who was formerly a legal adviser at the Electoral Commission has highlighted that around half of the people, if you ask them if they were registered to vote, think they are registered to vote but are in fact not registered to vote. That is 56% of private renters who are not registered to vote if you surveyed them are unaware that they are not registered to vote.
Patrick Brione
In that sense it is not necessarily reliable as a survey question to ask:, “Are you registered to vote?” because we know that the figures that come back are not actually reflective of reality.
Tracey Crouch
Great. As a geeky psephologist, my questions are done and answered. Thank you.
Mr Chope
The views of non-voters as to why they did not vote, they were perfectly legitimate reasons, weren’t they?
Patrick Brione
Absolutely, yes.
Mr Chope
So we are not criticising them for reaching these conclusions?
Damian Lyons Lowe
There was nothing toxic or strange in terms of the way that people think about the world, their hopes and dreams or their views on policies. That is fair.
Mr Chope
The refrain that parties and candidates are all the same and that their votes will not make any difference, which reflected more than half, that is a fair comment, isn’t it?
Fran O’Leary
I think that is a very unfair question.
Mr Chope
Let’s put it a different way. Your survey identified various people who people thought they would prefer to have as their representatives, people like—ironically and probably to the embarrassment of Paul Flynn—the Queen. People volunteered the Queen as being somebody they thought that would be an ideal representative for them. They also gave a lot of prominence of Boris Johnson. He is the only living politician who was identified. Can you explain why you think Boris Johnson came into that reckoning?
Fran O’Leary
On that point, we did not ask a supplementary about why they selected the particular people they did. It was open; they could suggest anyone they wanted. We stated, “Please put non-political figures” and Boris Johnson and Nelson Mandela made it into the list. I am curious about whether there is a case that some people somehow manage to transcend politics and communicate with people on a different level. We also asked people open questions about what they wanted their life to be like in 2020, what they wanted Britain to be like in 2020 and also what, if anything, they disliked about politics. The thing that was clear to me from there was that the word that came up the most often in the dislike list was the word “lies” or the concept that truths are not always told or that promises are not always carried out. On the positive front about the future there was a very clear sense that they believe in a great British dream, one that I think none of you would find surprising in terms of what they want. They want to be able to own their own homes, be debt free. They want to be safe and secure. They want a better life for their children and for the grandchildren. Some of them are concerned about the EU. Some of them are concerned about immigration. None of this will be a great surprise. So the thing for me is how do those who are in politics tackle the issue on trust and, secondly, on ensuring that politics, from whatever party communicates that parties do want the same great British dream that people want, whether they are voters or not. I think there are challenges there. There are mechanical challenges but there are also political challenges there to cross those barriers. I believe their views are legitimate but it is up to them what they do.
Mr Chope
From what you have just said, it sounds as if they should be voting Conservative. But why is Boris Johnson so special in this context?
Fran O’Leary
I think there is a point about him, in that he does get an incredibly large amount of air time and he does do a lot more media than some other politicians do. If you look at the programmes he appears on, they are not always the ones that Chris mentioned earlier that are viewed by the top strata in society. They are also ones with a slightly more populist appeal, and perhaps there is a case for politicians to think a little more about that and also the language they use and how they come across.
Damian Lyons Lowe
To respond to your point that they sound like Conservative voters, the voting intention among this group of non-voters was approximately—
Fran O’Leary
Of the 56% of those who did not vote in 2010 who said they would vote if there is an election tomorrow, I think around 32% said they would vote Labour, which was the largest grouping and something like 15% said Conservative. Something like 18% said UKIP and 22% said undecided. A very low number said Lib Dems.
Patrick Brione
We also asked them the simple question: if you had to choose would you rather have a Labour-led Government or a Conservative-led Government, and of the non-voters sampled 35% said Labour, 21% said Conservative and 44% said “Don’t know”.
Mr Chope
So do you think this is why Labour politicians are so obsessed with this particular subject matter because they think that there are a lot of—
Paul Flynn
It is about democracy.
Damian Lyons Lowe
They were talking about people in lower socio-economic groups. They were talking about people who are younger. They are much more likely to be Labour supporters.
Patrick Brione
I don’t think anyone would be surprised that people in the lower socio-economic groups or young voters are, on average, more likely to be Labour supporters than Conservative.
Fran O’Leary
I would argue that it is something that I believe everyone involved in politics should be concerned about, because it is an issue of democracy. I am personally worried that we have a generation coming through who may not vote at all, and what does that mean in terms of our stability as a democracy and the legitimacy of Parliament?
Mr Chope
I do not disagree with that. Can I just ask you this? You said that 84% of your respondents and 56% of non-voters said that they would probably have voted if there was a general election held tomorrow, so half the people who say they are non-voters would actually vote. Is that something we should be quite sceptical about?
Damian Lyons Lowe
Absolutely. You have addressed that, haven’t you?
Patrick Brione
Yes. Pollsters have been aware for a very long time that when you ask people in surveys whether they are likely to vote at the next general election people greatly over-exaggerate their chances of voting. This is something that the polling industry people are very aware of and people make corrections for this all the time as standard. So in this study 84% said they would vote in a general election tomorrow, including a majority of those that did not vote in the last election. We know for a fact that turnout has not reached 84% since 1950, so the chances of it doing so in the next general election I think it is fair to say are slim to none. As a comparison, for example, in terms of what proportion with the discounters, we did a final poll for the recent Newark by-election, which we did 48 hours before polling day. In that poll 64% of the representative sample of people we spoke to in the constituency said they were 10 out of 10 certain to vote in the election, and actually the turnout in that by-election was 52%. So, even people that say they are definitely going to vote—100% sure—in practice when it comes to it they don’t. The reasons for this are likely to be a number of things. Partly it is a case of a person taking the survey, giving the answer they think people want to hear; partly is they perhaps feel guilty about the fact that they are a non-voter and like to give the answer how they imagine themselves to be rather than how they actually are, and I think partly it is a case of people who perhaps have a genuine intention when you ask them. They think, “Yes, I would like to vote” but when it comes to the day they failed to consider that they might forget or they might just not feel bothered on the day or they might get distracted.
Damian Lyons Lowe
It is a known issue and some pollsters even look at your stated intention to vote when they are looking at the data—look at if you did vote in 2010 and apply a significant discount to your real intention to allow for that factor.
Patrick Brione
That is the reason why we structured this research around people that did not vote in the last election rather than around people that say they won’t vote in the next election, because the former is an actual definition based on reality, casting a vote is something that you can measure and we know represents the truth of whether you are going to or not.
Damian Lyons Lowe
What is interesting is that there is no reason in these sorts of polls for people to tell you that they are not going to do something, because they feel like they are going to be screened out of the survey because it is not going to be suitable for them. So you pretend that you are going to do something in online surveys because you are worried you are not going to get your pocket money for finishing the survey. Saying, “I did not vote in 2010” it is almost certainly the case.
Patrick Brione
Those will be honest, genuine people that did not vote.
Mr Chope
Thank you very much.
Chair
Andrew, did you want to come in or are you about to disappear—
Mr Turner
No, that is answered.
Chair
Chris, I know you were interested in that area.
Chris Ruane
The Electoral Commission are proposing to introduce photo ID before people can vote in 2019 because the public are scared about the issue of fraud. I gave the statistic before. One case for electoral registration fraud since 2008, so the Electoral Commission acted on this and want to impose photo ID even before IER comes into place next year. Fran, you said you have been over to America, you have seen the American system. In America it is the right-wing Republican states that have introduced voter ID as part of a voter suppression policy. Do you think if the independent Electoral Commission introduce this it will improve voter turnout for the poorest in society?
Fran O’Leary
I definitely don’t and I am concerned about that move. What I saw in Las Vegas was the way they increased turnout there was to increase turnout among people who are defined as black or Latino. Among those communities many of them had never voted before and many of them were concerned that if they registered to vote they might get deported or they might get hassled from the state in another form. Whether that is rational or irrational there were concerns about filling in forms and how to do it properly, all of those issues. In the UK, when I have engaged with people about voter registration, I have heard numerous times that people are concerned about the form, the fear associated with it. There are some of those similar kinds of fears out there. I am concerned that adding another barrier to registration could deter more people, who are not necessarily engaged in form filling and issues like that, from doing so. If I can finish quickly, in my written evidence I have referenced some of the ways we can potentially increase registration in the UK—and some of that was inspired by an article by John Spellar, another MP, and also by the leader of Sandwell Council—some very easy, cheap solutions that councils can employ to increase voter registration. I believe that there are probably other great examples from around the country from different councils that I don’t know about, which could also be drawn together to create best practice to increase rather than deter. I think that is what the Electoral Commission’s focus should be on. Frankly, the fact that registration is so low at the moment, when bureaucracy could be armed to do it better, is a disgrace.
Damian Lyons Lowe
I don’t know the statistics but I think the Commission’s own data is that fraud as a proportion of elections is very low. Just on individual voter registration, in terms of that being a challenge to this topic, in 2012 there was a Department for Work and Pensions pilot scheme, which was trying to match their data to the register data. They found that only 82% of their own data matched that of the register. So there is a risk with IER that the register becomes further skewed to people with stable addresses and employment. Private tenants are the lowest level of voter registration at 56%. They are often the people that are harder to reach, more volatile, more moving around, lots of flats type of people. The register has a risk of being skewed to an older, stable, more established group of people and the nature of the electorate will change.
Chris Ruane
Finally, another measure that the Electoral Commission are proposing is to restrict political parties handing out and collecting postal ballot registration forms. Now 50% of people who voted in the Police and Crime Commissioner elections were postal voters. In 2009 you were twice as likely to vote in the European elections if you had a postal vote. Again they are putting forward these proposals because of the huge concern in the public, despite the fact there has only been one successful prosecution since 2010. What effect do you think this limitation on political parties to connect with their voters, not for them to put postal votes, will have on voter turnout? Will it improve it or will it make it worse?
Fran O’Leary
Honestly, I am very concerned about that. I just think their focus should be on what they can do to increase as opposed to adding more barriers into the system. We know that postal votes are incredibly useful for people who have busy lives. We know that is one of the reasons why people suggested to us that they are interested in internet voting. I think to take away one mechanism of people on the ground being able to help their friends or people they have met to sign up, whether they are a member of a political party, I think it is a mistake. I do not understand the logic behind it.
Damian Lyons Lowe
We thought that one of the surprising conclusions—something that Fran has mentioned—was there were a lot of very similar concerns about issues between the two groups and their hopes and their attitudes to various issues. I think it is very important to look at ways to connect issues into the political system. Severing a link like that could risk that ability to connect with the voter. We relate that to politics because we have a disconnect between things that people care about and a political party. I think you make a valid point.
Patrick Brione
One quick thing on that, from our poll when we asked non-voters what their main reason was why they did not vote, as well as the large number that said things like, “I don’t believe my vote will make a difference” and so on, there were 9% that said they were not able to access a polling station or get a postal ballot as their main reason. That is a small portion but I think it is still a significant number of people that said they have obstacles in some way and they perhaps are a separate group of non-voters that need separate measures to address their—
Chris Ruane
The Electoral Commission’s own survey says 96% of people with postal ballots are happy with them.
Chair
Paul, come in, yes.
Paul Flynn
Very briefly on the interesting questions raised by Christopher and the Royals. I understand that Prince William is the most popular of the Royals, more popular than the Queen and far more popular than Prince Charles. Boris Johnson is certainly popular, and the picture that most of us have of him is of being stranded on a wire waving two little Union Jacks. Nigel Farage had a huge amount of negative publicity but did very well in the elections. Can you conclude from that in your studies that political popularity depends on the volume of publicity rather than the quality of the publicity?
Chair
One-word answers, please.
Fran O’Leary
On the basis of our study I don’t think we can comment on that.
Patrick Brione
I don’t think we have any data to confirm or deny that.
Damian Lyons Lowe
I think the further you can disconnect a politician from politics then they can speak to the people who feel that they are disconnected from politics.
Chair
So it is about depoliticising our democracy.
Fran O’Leary
No.
Patrick Brione
I wouldn’t want that for you.
Chair
Is that not a logical conclusion from what you have said?
Fran O’Leary
I don’t think so. I don’t think at all. My view, on the basis of what we have seen is that there is a problem in connecting parties to the great British dream. Perhaps that is a problem on the basis of how parties communicate, what they are communicating, but they need to be communicating to the absolute core of what people want and not ignoring the things that they say, whether that is about getting the UK out of the EU or the other issues raised.
Chair
You may want to connect, you may wish to communicate, but if your message is mediated on a daily basis you often cannot, despite every possible effort, talk to people about serious political issues because of the mediation between you and the electorate.
Damian Lyons Lowe
Survation with a partner were piloting some methods to engage non-voters to register to vote and for voters to participate in politics using data to personalise communications with potential voters, so getting the issue connected to doing something about it and voting for a party, and how do you personalise that and make it relevant to the person, rather than a broadcaster. One thing I want to strongly suggest is that if there is a major Government initiative, or any initiative, with funding that encourages the public to vote that whatever ideas transpire the Government should use commercial market research techniques, in the same way that the advertising industry and the marketing industry use, to consider: what is the best way to do this? What are the best messages? What is the most effective way? Not just splurging a lot of money on an issue but trying to do some research on what would be the most effective way to reconnect to these people.
Chair
There are two questions there. One is about Government and the other is about Parliament and they are two separate institutions. If you want Members of Parliament to communicate more directly they will need the facility and resource to do that and then people will need to say that it is appropriate that they have that resource, rather than, “There they go again. They are getting more money for themselves”, which is often a mediated view of whenever people do try to communicate more effectively. Everyone round this table has had that experience. Even something as low grade as an annual report going to every constituent became a big issue that Members of Parliament were somehow abusing the system. So there is a bit of an education job to take place there as well perhaps. Anyway, before we finish Tracey was very keen to come in.
Tracey Crouch
I want to follow up something Damian said. Did you guys see Voter Man from Denmark? Did you see the video that was put together by the Danish Parliament to try to encourage young Danish folk to get involved?
Fran O’Leary
I haven’t seen that video.
Damian Lyons Lowe
I haven’t seen it.
Tracey Crouch
It was banned because it was rather obscene in parts, but the principle of the video was to get people to register to vote for the European elections, and the consequences of what could happen. I would encourage you to look at it. It is not banned on YouTube, but—
Damian Lyons Lowe
Was this the wake up in the morning argument?
Tracey Crouch
Yes.
Damian Lyons Lowe
Okay.
Tracey Crouch
You have not seen it but my question was going to be was do you think in principle that is the sort of thing that we should be doing, not the obscene content but the actual principle of getting that cartoony-type message out to the younger generation to register to vote because if not these are the consequences?
Damian Lyons Lowe
I think everything should be tested. However controversial or wacky they might sound they should be tested.
Patrick Brione
Certainly coming up with as wide a range of ideas as possible and then testing them to find out which are in reality the most effective ones, I think that is certainly the way to go forwards with it.
Fran O’Leary
From the data we have found we have certainly seen that digital communications feed younger people who say they don’t vote. That is important including Facebook as well as YouTube. Secondly for them the family is a core role and interpersonal interactions play a big role. They are slightly less interested in newspapers than young people who do vote. So looking at those two areas, I know you guys have taken evidence from the ballot and doing more of the interpersonal registration issues, and there are key areas to focus on, but I absolutely agree with Damian on the testing front. Every idea should be tested rigorously before—
Damian Lyons Lowe
I think it is very interesting—sorry, if I may—Facebook and Twitter are a personally customised data source. I think that is a bit of a clue to how people want things to be. They want things to be personalised and customised to them personally. So if you are looking to connect with somebody the way that social media has exploded as a concept is that you choose who you want to follow, the things that you care about and the things that you want to see, and I think that would be a good directional force about connection.
Chair
And has to be of sufficient quality and length that you can put over what could be a quite complicated argument. It doesn’t quite fit in the 117 characters.
Tracey Crouch
One hundred and forty.
Chair
I will need to get upgraded, obviously. But anyway we look forward to the remake of the Danish film, possibly starring Mr Flynn and Mr Russell Brand. I had better stop there. Fran, Patrick, Damian, thank you so much for your time.
Damian Lyons Lowe
It has been a pleasure. Thank you.
Chair
It has been quite instructive. If you have further thoughts please do not hesitate to drop them to us in writing and we will take it into account as we move towards, hopefully, creating an interesting report for all parties to act upon about improving voter engagement, whoever wins the next general election. Thank you so much.
Fran O’Leary
Thank you.
Patrick Brione
Thank you.
Chair
Thank you, colleagues, for your attendance this morning. Voter engagement in the UK, HC 232