Policy playground

The Policy playground is a collection of British public policy proposals, written for intellectual exploration of ideas within the current and recent historical British constitutional system. Each proposal takes a topic from across British public life — education, justice, the franchise, the funding of public broadcasting, the structure of policing, the constitution of the House of Lords, the relationship between Parliament and the Palace of Westminster — and works it up into a traditional ministerial submission: a 200- to 500-word framing summary followed by a roughly two-page numbered submission to a relevant Secretary of State.

The submission format is a deliberate constraint. The British Civil Service has, over a century and a half, evolved a particular discipline for putting a proposal to a minister: a clear statement of the issue, the background, the arguments on each side, two or three options for action with the trade-offs of each laid out, and the costs, devolved-government implications, and human-rights considerations that the minister is obliged to weigh. Working an idea up into that form forces a level of completeness that a blog post or a tweet does not — and exposes the places where the idea, on inspection, falls apart.

Topics span economics (taxation, regulation, the dispersal of growth), operational concepts (policing structure, ministerial transparency), and statecraft (the meta-policy concept of how institutions are arranged, what they signal, and how they hold together). The framing aims to reflect realistic constitutional and institutional constraints — devolution settlements, the limits of Crown patronage, the practical reality of Whitehall delivery — rather than to start from a clean sheet of paper.

None of these proposals is advocacy. They are arguments that could be put, set out in the form they would be put in, so that the substance and the trade-offs can be examined honestly. Where the author has a view, it is generally that the question deserves to be asked — not that any particular answer is the right one.

Submissions

Submissions are grouped by subject. Each links through to the full text.

Democracy

• Democracy A Commons vote of confidence following mid-term prime ministerial succession
  Published 15.viii.2026

  The United Kingdom has no formal Commons process for installing a new Prime Minister. The Sovereign appoints whoever appears most likely to command the confidence of the House of Commons, a judgement made on the advice of the outgoing Prime Minister, soundings among MPs, and, in practice, the outcome of the governing…

• Democracy Extension of the right to vote to all citizens from birth, with parental proxy to a defined age
  Updated 15.viii.2026 · published 21.iii.2026

  The franchise in the United Kingdom has historically been extended by lowering the age threshold at which citizenship is deemed to confer the right to vote. The Representation of the People Bill 2026-27 continues this progression, extending the franchise to 16-year-olds for all UK elections. This submission examines a…

• Democracy Reform of House of Lords appointments through a structured framework of nominations
  Updated 15.viii.2026 · published 22.iii.2026

  The House of Lords's legitimacy rests partly on the quality and independence of its membership. Yet the mechanism by which the majority of that membership is constituted — Prime Ministerial nomination under constitutional convention, largely unconstrained by statute — provides no structural guarantee of either, and…

Economics

• Economics Reform of the fiscal event calendar and the Office for Budget Responsibility
  Published 15.viii.2026

  On 26 November 2025, the Office for Budget Responsibility's full Economic and Fiscal Outlook — including the entire contents of that day's Budget — became accessible on the OBR's own website via an unprotected link shortly after the Chancellor began her speech, well ahead of its intended release. An investigation led…

• Economics Reform of council tax and non-domestic rates
  Updated 15.viii.2026 · published 24.v.2026

  Council tax in England is assessed against property valuations made in 1991. Non-domestic rates remain a tax on the rateable value of business premises, with the multiplier moving on a three-yearly revaluation cycle but the underlying base unchanged in structure since 1990. Both taxes are repeatedly identified as…

Education

• Education Standards for streaming and setting across mainstream secondary education
  Published 21.iii.2026

  Subject setting — grouping pupils by attainment level within individual subjects — is already near-universal in English secondary schools, particularly in mathematics, English, and science. Whole-school streaming by general ability is rarer and more contested. Neither practice is currently subject to statutory…

Justice

• Justice Decriminalisation of personal drug possession
  Published 21.iii.2026

  Possession of any controlled drug is a criminal offence under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Despite over fifty years of criminal enforcement, UK drug use rates are among the highest in Europe and drug-related deaths have risen for two consecutive decades. Scotland recorded over 1,000 drug deaths in 2022 — the highest…

Media

• Media Reform of the BBC's funding model
  Published 22.iii.2026

  The BBC licence fee — a flat annual levy on all households watching live television or using BBC iPlayer — has funded the corporation since 1923. The BBC's Royal Charter expires in December 2027, creating a statutory decision point for its renewal. The licence fee model faces mounting pressure: it is regressive in its…

Planning

• Planning Extending fast-track consenting powers for growth-critical development
  Published 15.viii.2026

  Two major planning reforms have reshaped how significant development gets consented in England within the space of five months. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, which received Royal Assent in December, sped up the national consenting regime for nationally significant infrastructure projects — energy,…

• Planning Reform of the Hybrid Bill procedure for major infrastructure consents
  Published 15.viii.2026

  High Speed 2 received Royal Assent for its first phase in February 2017, and has since needed to secure well in excess of 3,000 separate additional consents from statutory undertakers, local authorities, and other protected persons before construction could proceed in their vicinity — a consequence of the Hybrid Bill…

Policing

• Policing Merger of police services into one force per devolved nation and English region
  Updated 24.v.2026 · published 21.iii.2026

  England and Wales remain policed by 43 territorial forces of widely varying size and capacity. Scotland consolidated to a single force, Police Scotland, in 2013; Northern Ireland has operated as a single force since the establishment of the Police Service of Northern Ireland under the Patten Agreement. The January…

Statecraft

• Statecraft Decant of Parliament and Government from London for the duration of Palace restoration
  Published 24.v.2026

  The Palace of Westminster is in a state of well-documented physical deterioration. The Restoration and Renewal (R&R) programme, established under the Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Act 2019, has produced successive cost estimates rising from approximately £4 billion to over £20 billion, with…

• Statecraft Public on-the-record briefings by the Prime Minister's Official Spokesperson
  Published 24.v.2026

  The Prime Minister's Official Spokesperson conducts twice-daily briefings of accredited Lobby journalists in the basement of Number 10. Briefings are not broadcast; the PMOS is identified only by office and not as a named individual on camera; transcripts are published on gov.uk later the same day. The Lobby as a…

Whitehall

• Whitehall Putting the creation of arm's-length bodies on a statutory footing
  Published 15.viii.2026

  Arm's-length bodies — non-departmental public bodies, executive agencies, and a range of other statutory forms with no single legal definition in common — account for around 13% of total government expenditure, yet the Institute for Government's Read Before Burning report is blunt about the landscape they occupy:…

• Whitehall Completing the reform of the Ethics and Integrity Commission
  Published 15.viii.2026

  The Government's manifesto committed to establish "a new independent Ethics and Integrity Commission, with its own independent chair, to ensure probity in government", to give the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards the power to launch investigations without prior Prime Ministerial consent, and to introduce…

• Whitehall Reform of the machinery of mission-led government
  Published 15.viii.2026

  The previous Government organised its programme around five "missions" — economic growth, clean energy, NHS reform, safer streets, and opportunity — set out in the 2024 manifesto and translated into numbered milestones in the December 2024 Plan for Change. To drive them, it established mission boards,…

On the form

A traditional ministerial submission is structured as: Issue (what decision is required), Background (the factual context the minister needs), The General Case (the arguments for and against intervening at all), Options (typically two or three, each with its own For/Against), Costs and resources, Devolution (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland), Human rights and equalities, and a Recommendation. Paragraphs are numbered continuously through the submission so that ministers and officials can refer to them by number in subsequent correspondence — a feature reproduced here, with each numbered paragraph rendered as a discrete reference unit.

The format is the work of the British Civil Service, not the author. Any errors of form, omission, or substance in the proposals below are the author’s alone.