Click here for part one of the Distributed Democracy series
Another job of the Government is to give people permission to do things, such as build houses, power stations, etc, or to run pubs and other entertainment venues. This process is usually run by local council committees, and is therefore geared towards the kind of person who likes getting involved with the nitty-gritty of local politics such as going to planning meetings. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of them are interfering busy-bodies who will try and block any application if there's even the slightest hint it might cause them some inconvenience, even if it would be a benefit to someone else. A lot of planning committees have evolved to become vehicles to do just that, and operate by finding any shortcoming they can (such as a lack of bicycle racks) to act as justification for blocking the application. The result is that homes don't get built, resulting in astronomical rents and house prices, and businesses can't expand to provide jobs.
Part of the problem is that most people aren't at all interested in the minutiae of particular planning applications - I'm certainly not - and so have no incentive to go to a tedious planning meetings to debate the details. What I want to be able to do instead is to register my general opinion with whoever is in charge of planning so they can take it into account.
So, here's my suggested system. Any planning application is published on a web page. The web page has a comments section allowing anyone to make suggestions and raise issues regarding the application. Any interested party can score the application, giving it marks out of 100. However, scoring an application is not free - in order to judge the depth of feeling of the scoring party they pay for their score with an amount of vote credits that they choose, which act as a weight to apply to the score. If they have strong feelings about the application they can pay a lot of credits so their score is weighed more heavily. After a fixed time period, the weighted scores are averaged. If the resulting score is above a certain threshold - say, 70% - the application is passed. Above another threshold - say, 40% - the application is deferred, everyone gets their vote credits back, and the applicant gets another chance to rectify any problems. Otherwise the application is denied.
A variation on this theme, which would be more appropriate for large projects such as housing estates or power stations rather than loft extensions, would be to judge applications against each other instead of considering them separately. What we’d do is pool all the applications for housing or power stations in each region of the country, mark them all as before, then pick the top 20%. That would encourage developers to produce high quality proposals while making sure that some applications are passed. The “top 20%” could be the straight, numerical top 20%, or we could tot up the number of homes or megawatts we’d get if we allowed all applications and pick the top schemes until we arrived at 20% of that total.
The vote credits that are collected would be sent back to the organisation that issues them in the first place, where they'd be cancelled. This would mean that everybody else's vote credits would be worth a little bit more, so the overall result would be that people who weigh in on planning applications would pay to do so with some of their democratic power.
As I said, most people don't want to get involved with the planning process. Luckily, we have representative organisations who can get involved on our behalf, so we'd have a type of representative organisation (let's call it a "planning body") that does planning. These could be separate organisations specifically involved in planning, or part of a more general one. Planning bodies would publish a document that details which area (or areas) of the country they cover, and their scoring system for planning applications, and if you happen to agree with this you'd send them some vote credits.
Planning bodies could come in all shapes and sizes. There could be ones that covered a particular town, or a suburb within that town. There could be ones that specialised in national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty (some of these could object to all building work, others could allow small scale building in traditional materials, and they'd be balanced by how many vote credits each receives). Some could advocate for types of development, such as walkable housing estates, and score those highly.
Licensing would work in a similar way. An issue I want to address is that I recently saw a tweet from somebody complaining she'd been kicked out of a bar at 10:30 pm because it had to close. This would be fine in a sleepy village, but this was in Soho, in the heart of London's West End! Apparently, what's happening is that all the people who moved into Soho during it's heyday - because it was a vibrant, happening scene that they wanted to be part of - are now a lot older and a lot less vibrant. But moving out is such a faff, so what they're doing instead is trying to turn Soho into a sleepy suburb. The point is that licensing should take into account the needs of everyone using the area, not just those who live in it, and city centres are generally for the benefit of the whole city. The venues in suburbs are mainly there for local residents. A licensing system similar to the planning one should take care of this. People across the city who want a good night out now and then would likely fund licensing bodies that were liberal for the city centre, but would probably overall prefer stricter requirements for their local areas.
Part four of the Distributed Democracy series looks at legislation.