The Drawing Board for a prosperous future
Menu

Ideas from outside the room

Britain is full of people who can see exactly what is wrong with something and have no way to act on it. This is where they get to say what they would do instead. Each paper takes one problem and redraws it from the ground up. One asks who should own the oil under the North Sea. Another asks how much weight a vote should carry. The writers come from all walks of life, and it is often the fresh pair of eyes that spots what everyone inside the system has stopped noticing.

AI 1 paper

AI and the end of deflection: solve it first time, and price the exposure

Institutions bought AI to cut the cost of customer service, and the people complaining to them got the same AI free. Complaints now arrive at machine speed at every organisation that cannot safely automate its answers, councils and government departments as much as companies, so the defence is to resolve problems quickly and well at first contact, and to price what deflection really costs.
Democracy 2 papers

Proportional democratic weight: votes that track how long the voter lives with the result

Vote weight should track how long a voter lives with a decision, through a modest age-based multiplier and a custodial vote for every child from birth.

Training MPs for the job: a baseline curriculum with published completion

Members of Parliament arrive with no required preparation for work that asks them to weigh forensic evidence, capital adequacy, and a child's special educational needs in the same week, and none for the employment and security risks the job carries personally. They should be trained at the start of each parliament and each year after, and their constituents should be able to see whether they have done it.
Energy 2 papers

The state as first customer: solar and batteries on every public roof

A statutory programme should put solar and battery storage on every suitable public building, because the order book the state already controls is the fastest way to grow the British solar industry.

Who owns the barrel: service fees for North Sea extraction

New extraction licences should vest ownership of the oil and gas in the state, with operators paid a contracted service fee.
Government 1 paper

Hoping for normal: a register of the assumptions beneath national policy

Britain keeps a register of what could go wrong and no register of what it assumes stays true. Those assumptions are never written down, so evidence that one has died arrives looking like ordinary turbulence, and the state's response is to wait for conditions to return to normal. The assumptions should be written down, with the conditions of their own failure beside them and a name against each.
Health 1 paper

First response: first aid and emergency care from the first day of school to the last

A fourteen-year curriculum at one hour a week would take every school-leaver to the ceiling of lawful non-professional emergency care, and give the country a population that knows what to do.
National wealth 2 papers

A Department for National Wealth Creation

Britain creates enormous value through its own decisions and keeps none of it. A Department should capture that value, and an independent Fund should compound it for every generation that follows.

Who pays for the passport: a contribution from Britain's wealthiest non-residents

Wealthy British citizens abroad keep the right of return, consular protection and the security umbrella while some contribute little or nothing; a targeted levy would price the cover citizenship actually provides.
Technology 2 papers

Designed for the eighty: a senior managers regime for designated platforms

Corporate fines never reach the person who decided. The UK built that instrument for banking after 2008, and should extend it to the platforms it already designates.

The exit option: portable workloads and a sovereign British cloud

Government should make its cloud workloads portable by design and underwrite a British-European sovereign cloud as founding client. There is no point cutting off a customer who can simply move, which is how a supplier's hold over government ends.