UK Youth Parliament has been running for about eleven years now and it is now part of the
British Youth Council and we've brought the two together to produce something called the
Youth Select Committee, which is a group of young people aged fourteen
to eighteen who take evidence on a particular topic that is very
popular and has got a bit of a mandate from the young people in our country.
Sixteen to twenty-four year olds are about twelve percent of the population now,
but we are a hundred percent in the future. And so it is so essential that we're listened to.
In order for the Government and Parliament and everything to work properly, it needs
to take into account the opinions of all of its citizens,
and that includes the younger generation.
Young people should be represented at the top table in town halls and in government as well.
Parliament allows the Youth Parliament to use the chamber for a debate once a year.
November is definitely a key date in a Member of UK Youth Parliament's calendar because
that is when three hundred members of Youth Parliament from all across the country come
together, take over the House of Commons and debate the issues that
young people from all across the country have voted for.
It should be a genuine experience. We really want to give young people an opportunity to
use Parliament. We think that they can make a
genuine contribution, they can come forward with policy proposals.
Young people are the only other people, other than MPs, that can sit in the House of Commons
and debate, and doing it last year and speaking at the dispatch box was absolutely amazing.
If I'd said that to myself five years ago I would have just started laughing.
Unless people understand what we do, they can't influence what we do. So if you've got
people who are aged between eleven and eighteen coming
into Parliament every single year and actually using the chamber,
and doing in the chamber what we do, they have a direct experience of what it is like
to be an MP.
Today's topic for the Youth Select Committee has its origins and a mass vote of young people
in the population to pick five topics, that were subsequently debated in the House of
Commons by the UK Youth Parliament.
We've planned a UK Youth Select Committee, which we thought could take the outcome of
the debate and then conduct an investigation into that, along
the lines of a parliamentary select committee.
The Youth Select Committee, we're here to raise the voice of young people,
and this is an incredible platform to do this.
The Youth Select Committee is a unique programme, because very rarely do you have a group of
young people coming together to formally call for evidence,
collate that evidence and make it into a report and formally
present it to government.
We are holding government to account, by having Members of Parliament attend our oral evidence sessions.
I've been in front of many Select Committees, none was more gruelling than the one in front
of the Youth Select Committee.
The young people there had done their homework, they were passionate abouth their subject,
they weren't going to take fudged answers and they really got to the bottom of the issue.
It gives a group of young people an opportunity to see how Parliament works and to get involved.
And they're the types of young people who would go out and spread the word.
It's a fantastic model for making sure that there is a, a sort of a, constant generation
after generation of young people who are engaged
with politics.
I do feel like I'm working here as part of Parliament, because everyone here is doing
the same thing, they're going about parliamentary business,
and I am doing that as well.
Other young people from my community, who grew up with me and are growing up now, are
so engaged and in tune and inspired by what I've done,
because I'm just like them and it makes them know that Parliament, and
anything they want to do in fact, is more accessible to them if they just work hard
and have a passion for it.