Just over half of the British adults voted at the 2024 general election, making it the lowest turnout by share of population since universal suffrage, according to a report.
The Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank found that just 52% of UK adults cast their ballots on 4 July, which is the lowest since the vote was extended to all adults over 21 in 1928.
Turnout has been reported as being the lowest since 2001 – measured by votes counted as a proportion of adults who have registered to vote.
However, the IPPR said the figures are even lower as a share of the whole adult population, meaning if non-voting was a party, it would have the largest share of support by far.
Parth Patel, a senior research fellow at the IPPR and co-author of the report, said the fact that only one in two adults voted this year was “shocking”.
“If democracy is collective self-rule and only half of us are voting, you do have to ask about the other half, who politics and policymaking are less responsive to as a result,” he said.
Amid concerns over low turnout, Labour is planning an elections bill next week after promising reform. It is expected to lower the voting age to 16 from 18 and introduce automatic voter registration – to make it easier for people to turn up at a polling station and cast their ballot.
The IPPR report also found that seats where a larger share of the population were older people, wealthy homeowners and white had much higher turnout rates than constituencies where a smaller share of people came from those demographics.
It calculated that turnout was 11% higher in constituencies with the highest proportion of over 64-year-olds, compared with the lowest. Turnout was also 13% higher in constituencies with the highest proportion of homeowners.
In terms of ethnicity and religion, turnout was 7% lower in constituencies with the highest proportion of people from minority ethnic backgrounds, compared with the lowest, and 10% lower in constituencies with the highest proportion of Muslim people.
The IPPR report said: “Put simply, the ‘haves’ speak much louder than the ‘have-nots’ in British democracy.
“Those who stand to benefit most from democratic policymaking are those with the weakest voices in the room. This is one way to make sense of policy puzzles in the heart of our democracy. Why have we have allowed housing to become so unaffordable? Tolerated income and wealth inequality to rise and remain high? Protected pensions but not social security for working people?”
It added: “The new government has the chance to break out of the democratic doom loop between political participation and policy responsiveness.”
There have long been concerns about trying to get more people to vote to improve democratic outcomes, but the previous Conservative government only took steps to put an additional barrier in place by requiring photo ID.
Polling suggested last week that more than 400,000 people may have been prevented from voting in the general election because they lacked the necessary ID, with those from minority ethnic communities more than twice as likely to have experienced this.
Of those surveyed by pollsters More In Common, 3.2% said they were turned away at least once last Thursday, which if reflected across the UK would equate to more than 850,000 people. Of these, more than half said they either did not return or came back and were still unable to vote.
Labour is not pledging to change the policy in government, beyond looking at potentially expanding the list of acceptable documents, which currently includes six types of pass for older people but no equivalent ones for younger people.
