Members of Youth Parliament (MYP's) for the Vale of Glamorgan and Cardiff and the chair of the Vale Youth Forum went to Cardiff Bay to have a meeting with Stephen Doughty MP to discuss the national priority - Votes at 16! Over 112,000 young people who took part in the recent Make Your Mark consultation voted to give 16 and 17 year olds a vote and it was voted as the national priority by over 300 MYPs at the annual sitting in November.
Our first job as MYPs is to get as much support for the campaign as possible including local politicians and decision-makers.
After discussing the topic is was very clear that Stephen Doughty, MP for Cardiff South & Penarth supports Votes at 16 and has been a champion for many years now. So we didn't have much of a job to do in trying to get him to support our campaign! He was very happy to listen and see what we had to say on the topic.
We updated him on what the Vale Youth Forum and Cardiff Youth Council had been up to lately and the main priorities for young people locally. All of his responses to our questions were really interesting and it caught our attention that he used to be a member of a Youth Parliament himself and also attended a comprehensive school in the Vale.
As MYPs we are now looking towards working on the next step, which will further promote the importance of votes@16 for young people and raise awareness of the current UKYP campaign.
