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<p>The Government is committed to respecting, protecting and promoting our democracy.
We want to build upon recent record levels of individuals registering to vote and
participating in elections. Our Register to Vote website is widely used by young people:
over 7.83 million online applications have been submitted by 16-24 year olds since
the service was introduced in 2014. Ahead of the General Election in June 2017 young
people aged under 25 were particularly engaged, submitting over 1 million applications
- more than 35% of all applications received in the pre-election period.</p><p> </p><p>
</p><p> </p><p>Since then we have taken further steps to promote democratic engagement
amongst young people. Making use of the Suffrage Fund, we have delivered three projects
to promote youth engagement: a scheme to recruit and train 1000 youth Democracy Ambassadors;
the development and publication of a toolkit for parliamentarians to engage young
people; and a new history and citizenship resource for secondary schools (<a href="http://www.suffrageresources.org.uk"
target="_blank">www.suffrageresources.org.uk</a>).</p><p> </p><p>The Government’s
recent report, <em><a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/democratic-engagement-respecting-protecting-and-promoting-our-democracy"
target="_blank">Democratic Engagement: Respecting, Protecting and Promoting Our Democracy</a>,</em>
sets out how we work with partners to encourage democratic participation. This includes
National Democracy Week, which convenes youth focused organisations such as the British
Youth Council, UK Youth, Elevation Networks and Patchwork Foundation to deliver targeted
democratic engagement activity. The report also highlights steps to help Higher Education
providers work with local authorities to promote electoral registration amongst their
student populations.</p><p> </p><p>DCMS provides funding for the UK Youth Parliament,
Youth Select Committee and Make Your Mark ballot which support young people to raise
issues on local and national levels.</p><p> </p><p>Make Your Mark is a ballot of youth
views which gives the UK Youth Parliament its mandate and gets young people, aged
11-18, involved in democracy, with over 1 million young people voting in 2018. (<a
href="http://www.ukyouthparliament.org.uk/makeyourmark/" target="_blank">http://www.ukyouthparliament.org.uk/makeyourmark/</a>)<br></p>
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