The seats that Labour's teenage voters will steal from Reform

Telegraph

17-07-2025

Sir Keir Starmer's decision to hand 16-year-olds the vote will overwhelmingly favour the Left, an analysis shows.
The Prime Minister was accused of 'breathtaking' cynicism after announcing plans to bring the voting age down to 16 in line with Scottish and Welsh elections.
Tory and Reform UK figures claimed the Labour leader was trying to 'rig' future elections amid his party's waning political support since taking office last year.
An analysis by The Telegraph has found that the decision would hand Labour 206,000 new voters in England and Wales.
At last year's general election, 18 to 24-year-olds gave Labour 41 per cent of their vote and the Greens a further 19 per cent, according to Ipsos. Combined, that is 20 points higher than their vote share across the entire electorate.
On the Right, however, Reform and the Conservatives secured just 13 per cent combined from under-25s against a national vote share of 38 per cent.
Applying those figures to the 1.35 million potential new voters who would be added to the electoral roll, and adjusting for the 37 per cent turnout, Labour is on track to secure more than 200,000 new voters, while the Greens would gain around 100,000.
Nigel Farage's Reform UK would secure just 40,000 new voters.
In an election, at a localised level, these 500,000 new voters are just a drop in the ocean of the 26 million votes cast.
The Telegraph estimates that at last year's election, assuming the 18 to 24 voting trends were replicated evenly across the country, Labour could have gained an extra seven seats across England and Wales.
That would have been enough for Sir Keir to match Sir Tony Blair's 1997 landslide election victory with the 'teen' vote helping mop up seats where the Conservatives then held with incredibly small margins.
It could have also reduced Reform's take by a fifth, with South Basildon and East Thurrock being one of the potential seats lost with an extended franchise.
An additional 358 Labour votes from under-18s would have overrun James McMurdock's wafer-thin 123 seat majority and spared Reform the recent embarrassment of his resignation from the party.
However, these kinds of extrapolations assume an even split and even turnout across the country. In reality, voting patterns would vary depending on the area's makeup.
A year since coming to power, Labour no longer dominates the polls and Reform is now increasingly likely to win the next election.
A recent YouGov MRP poll, which produces likely results constituency by constituency, showed that Reform are on track to win 271 seats, making them the largest party, but 55 short of an overall majority.
Labour has also lost some of the support of the youngest 18 to 24 voters, falling to 28 per cent, with the Greens on 26 per cent and Lib Dems on 20 per cent, according to the latest YouGov poll.
Reform UK, however, have not seen their meteoric rise among the youngest voters, maintaining the same vote share as in the 2024 election at 8 per cent.
If these new voting shares to 16 to 17-year-olds are adjusted to YouGov's likely election situation, the impact is clear: Reform would lose out.
They would lose 12 of those seats, with most going to Labour, and pull Mr Farage further from Downing Street.
Similar caveats apply, even more so when looking forward, as the population makeup is changing rapidly.
However, the point remains that the next election is likely to see tiny margins of victory if voters remain as divided as they are now. Any disadvantage that skews away from Reform will make the likelihood of a majority increasingly unlikely.
As ever in British politics, however, it is unlikely to go that simply for Labour.
For instance, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana's new hard-Left political party could create an earthquake for younger voters.
One in three voters aged under-25 previously said that they would consider voting for this new party when it formally emerges.
Analysis from More in Common also highlights that seats with the highest number of 16 to 17-year-olds saw independents and Workers Party perform their best.
Young voters, it would seem, are the most drawn to Labour, but also the most likely to stray from the traditional Left altogether.
This fragmentation could help Reform avoid the worst of the impacts a franchise extension could have.
And importantly, while the policy may dent at Reform's chance at the next election, the one group unlikely to reap any significant benefits from the voting reform is the party implementing it, Labour. Once guaranteed the youth vote, even they are abandoning it.