Executive Summary
The UK's political problems are the source of its economic and social ones. The NHS is underfunded, education is unequal, housing is unaffordable, and welfare is skewed toward the wealthier elderly. None of these outcomes is inevitable. They persist because the political system that could address them is held in place by the people and interests that gain from the status quo.
This pillar makes four arguments. First, first-past-the-post, run in a multi-party democracy, distorts representation so badly that large-scale reform rarely gets through. Second, private money in politics buys the rules that protect the money that buys the rules, and that matters more than any single scandal. Third, widening who takes part in decisions, through votes at 16, citizens' assemblies and referendums on constitutional questions, changes political outcomes in ways the current system cannot. Fourth, none of the other pillars in this project can be fully delivered without these changes, which is why this one comes first.
None of this belongs to the left or the right. First-past-the-post has handed both Labour and the Conservatives majorities the vote did not justify, and private money has flowed to both. The problem is the system both parties run on.
Key Proposals
Introduce proportional representation for Westminster. Via a citizens' assembly process choosing the specific system, with the recommendation subject to a public referendum.
Cap political donations and introduce public funding. £500 per year individual donation cap, full public funding for parties clearing 2% of the national vote, and real-time disclosure of all donations above £100.
Close the revolving door. A statutory five-year cooling-off period between government positions and roles in regulated industries, enforced by an independent body with genuine sanctioning powers.
Reduce the voting age to 16. With automatic registration and statutory non-partisan civic education in the national curriculum.
Establish a permanent Citizens' Assembly Commission. A standing body examining structural policy questions, with recommendations guaranteed parliamentary debate within six months.
Introduce genuine fixed-term Parliaments. A five-year cycle insulated from prime ministerial dissolution for political advantage.
1. The Diagnosis
The UK's political system was not designed for a multi-party democracy. First-past-the-post comes from an era of two-party politics, when the winning candidate in a constituency usually had a majority or near-majority of local votes. That world has gone. In the 2024 general election, Labour won a 174-seat majority on 33.7% of the vote1, the lowest share for a majority government in modern British history. Nothing malfunctioned. The system did what it was built to do, and that is the problem.
The result is a Parliament that does not reflect the country. Parties with substantial national support (the Liberal Democrats on 12%, the Greens on 7%, Reform on 14%) win seats wildly out of line with their vote share, or almost none. Parties whose votes fall in the right constituencies win landslides on a minority of the vote. In a safe seat, one party is so dominant that the result is settled before polling day, and safe seats are common: before the 2024 election, 111 seats, one in six, had been held by the same party since at least 1924.2 The people who live in them get a foregone conclusion instead of a contest.
Private money in politics3 works the same way. Wealthy donors need not be individually corrupt. The system lines up political decisions with donor interests without any explicit deal. A party that takes large donations from property developers has different incentives, before anyone walks into a meeting, from a party that does not. Nobody has to maintain that alignment on purpose. It sits in the relationships, the staff, the culture, and the priorities that follow the funding.
So does the revolving door between government and the industries it regulates4. A minister who expects to join a financial services firm after office, or a regulator who expects to move into the sector they oversee, has a reason to serve those future employers. Corruption isn't required, only people responding to the incentives in front of them. The current system creates those incentives and then acts surprised by the results.
2. The Steel Man: The Strongest Case Against Change
The Generational Reset takes counter-arguments seriously. These are the strongest objections to Political Renewal, with our answers.
'First-past-the-post produces strong, stable governments that can act decisively'
This is the best argument for the current system, and it deserves a serious answer. FPTP does tend to produce majority governments with clear mandates, and coalitions under PR can be unstable, as Italy and Israel show. The UK's post-war record includes governments that made sweeping changes, such as the 1945 welfare state and 1980s privatisation, which might have been harder under coalition politics.
Our answer is that stability and legitimacy are different things. A government elected on 33.7% of the vote that pushes through sweeping change has stability, but little democratic legitimacy. The countries with the strongest long-term policy records (Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands) are coalition democracies, and their stability comes from cross-party consensus built under PR, not from big single-party majorities. The UK's "strong" governments have produced thirty years of inconsistent economic strategy, a housing crisis four decades in the making, and an NHS that swings between crisis and managed decline. The evidence doesn't support the stability argument. Nor does the case rest on foreign examples alone: the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly have used proportional systems for more than two decades without Italian- or Israeli-style instability (see 3.1 below).
'PR leads to extremist parties gaining influence'
This claim can be tested, and the answer depends on how the system is designed, not on proportionality alone. German electoral law shuts out parties below 5% of the vote, and that threshold has worked: no extremist party has entered the Bundestag on a small vote share. The Netherlands shows what happens without one. Its effective bar for a seat is about 0.66% of the vote, one of the lowest in the world. The result has been chronic fragmentation, government formation taking 223 and 299 days after its last two elections, and small parties, including extreme ones, gaining bargaining power well beyond their vote share.5 So the defensible claim is the German one. PR avoids this risk when the system sets a real threshold, and not automatically wherever it is used. That is why Key Proposal 1 asks a citizens' assembly to recommend a specific, fully designed model rather than proportionality in the abstract. FPTP, for its part, did not stop UKIP and Reform from reshaping mainstream party platforms while winning far fewer seats than their vote share.
There is a wider point. If a large part of the electorate holds views the established parties ignore, a democratic system should reflect that, within the rule of law, rather than suppress it through electoral mechanics. Representing a wide range of views, including uncomfortable ones, is part of how democracy is meant to work. Shutting legitimate views out of representation carries a much greater risk than proportionality does.
'The public has already rejected PR in the 2011 referendum'
The 2011 referendum was on the Alternative Vote, a preferential system that is not proportional. The campaign was widely seen as poorly argued on both sides, and it ran at a time of intense hostility to the coalition government that proposed it. It was not a vote on proportional representation. The UK has never had a well-informed, properly argued public debate on what its electoral system should be. This pillar argues that it should.
'Single-member ranked-choice voting is a better reform than full proportional representation'
This objection is more serious than the last one. It argues for a different replacement for first-past-the-post, not for keeping it. Under ranked-choice voting in single-member seats, a candidate needs support from voters beyond their own base to win, which rewards moderation over narrow appeal. There is real evidence for this. In a 2023 German constituency runoff, a more moderate candidate gained far more second-round support than a more polarising rival, although the polarising candidate still won. Research on Australia's House of Representatives and on US local ranked-choice reforms finds a similar moderating effect.6
But ranked-choice voting does not fix the problem this pillar is about. Australia shows this most clearly. Its House of Representatives has used full preferential voting since 1918, and it still regularly gives a seat majority to a party with a minority of first-preference votes nationally, the same disproportion described in Section 1.7 Australia's answer was to add proportionality elsewhere: its Senate has been elected by PR since 1948, because the preferential House does not produce proportional results on its own.7 Ranked-choice voting moderates outcomes within a single seat. It does nothing about the gap between national vote share and national seat share.
We do concede one point. A preferential ballot tackles the safe-seat problem from Section 1, that most constituencies face no real contest, more directly than a closed party list does. List PR can still give candidates safe positions within their party, with no need to build support beyond their own base. The Single Transferable Vote avoids this. It is proportional, but it uses a preferential ballot in multi-member seats, so seat share still tracks vote share while candidates keep the incentive to reach beyond their base. This is one reason Key Proposal 1 leaves the choice of system to a citizens' assembly rather than defaulting to list PR. STV, already used in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, answers this objection in a way a party-list system on its own does not.
3. The Case for Change
3.1 Proportional Representation
The case for proportional representation rests on evidence, not ideology. Across comparable democracies, proportional systems are associated with higher turnout8, more women and minorities in parliament, greater trust in political institutions9, more consistent long-term policy, and less polarisation.
The specific system matters less than the principle. Germany's Additional Member System, the Single Transferable Vote used in Scottish local elections and Irish parliamentary elections, and the party-list systems used across Europe all represent voters far more accurately than FPTP.10 Choosing between them involves real trade-offs, such as local representation against proportionality, or coalition stability against voter choice. Those trade-offs should be settled by informed public debate, not by party preference.
The UK already uses these systems. The Scottish Parliament and the London Assembly have used the Additional Member System since they were created in 1999 and 2000. The Northern Ireland Assembly has used STV since 1998, Northern Ireland's local elections since 1973, and Scotland's local elections since 2007. That is decades of working devolved government under more proportional systems, and it has not produced the coalition instability that critics of Westminster PR warn about (see the Steel Man above).
Wales went further. From the 2026 election, the Senedd replaced AMS with a fully proportional closed-list system.11 That reform is too recent to count as evidence either way. Plaid Cymru's minority government, six seats short of a majority, lost a supplementary budget vote in July 2026 after coalition talks with Welsh Labour collapsed, and independent analysis since has called its position fragile.1213 The case for PR at Westminster rests on the long Scottish and Northern Irish record, not on Wales's untested new system, and it has no need to overstate Wales.
Introduce a proportional or mixed electoral system for Westminster elections, chosen through a citizens' assembly with a mandate to recommend a specific model. The choice of system (STV, AMS, or a party-list variant) should be made by a body representative of the public, not by the parties that benefit from the current arrangement. The assembly's recommendation should be put to a referendum with a well-funded, balanced public information campaign.
In the 2024 general election, Labour won 63% of seats (411 of 650) on 33.7% of the vote1, the lowest share for a majority government in modern British history. One seat in six had been held by the same party for a century before 2024.2 The Liberal Democrats won 72 seats in 2024 against 11 in 2019 on a near-identical vote share of about 12%, purely because of where those votes fell.
Safe seats remove competitive electoral pressure, the one mechanism that would otherwise tie an MP's incentives to their constituents' interests rather than to donors, industry connections, or inertia. This connecting argument is this project's own; no single source states it. Because many seats face no real contest, most MPs answer to party selectorates and existing interests rather than to voters who could be persuaded either way. That is why reforms proposed elsewhere in this project hit the same wall whichever party is in office: the electoral mechanics that protect the status quo stay the same when governments change.
The causation above supports more than one response. One is to keep first-past-the-post and rely on the "strong, stable government" case set out in the Steel Man. Another is the Alternative Vote, a preferential but non-proportional system put to a UK-wide referendum in 2011 and rejected, in a campaign this pillar's Steel Man calls poorly argued on both sides. A third is full proportional representation, with the specific system (STV, AMS, or a party-list variant) left to a citizens' assembly rather than fixed in advance, since this pillar accepts that choosing between them involves real trade-offs.
Choosing full PR over AV or the status quo rests on a value judgement this pillar makes openly: that a Parliament which reflects how people voted matters more than the simplicity and habitual stability of single-party government, even though majority governments have delivered major reform in the past (the 1945 welfare state, 1980s privatisation), as the Steel Man concedes. A reader who values decisive single-party government above proportional accuracy, or who thinks the cost of changing the system outweighs the benefit, is not wrong on the evidence. They are weighing the same facts against a different view of what makes a government legitimate.
Introduce a proportional or mixed electoral system for Westminster, chosen by a citizens' assembly and confirmed by referendum. The falsification test below sets out what would show that electoral reform is not the key to delivering other reforms, as this pillar claims.
3.2 Private Money in Politics
The case for taking private money out of politics does not claim that every donation is corrupt. It claims that private funding lines up political decisions with donor interests without any explicit deal, and that this skews policy in ways the public cannot easily see or challenge.
The alternative is full public funding for qualifying parties, with strict caps on individual donations, equal airtime and firm spending limits. Most European democracies already fund politics this way. The objection that public money should not fund parties misses the point. Politics will be funded either way; the question is who pays. Today private money pays, and it comes with strings. Public funding comes with democratic accountability.
Cap individual political donations at £500 per year, introduce full public funding for all parties clearing 2% of the national vote, mandate equal broadcasting time for all qualifying parties during election campaigns, and require real-time public disclosure of all donations above £100.
P3Close the revolving door between government and regulated industries with a five-year cooling-off period, enforced by an independent statutory body with real powers to impose sanctions.
3.3 Expanding the Franchise
Votes at 16 is already the law in many places. Sixteen-year-olds vote in devolved elections in Scotland and Wales14, in national elections in Austria and Malta, and in European Parliament elections in Germany, Belgium and several other EU member states15. (Germany and Belgium still set the national voting age at 18.) The main argument against it, that 16-year-olds lack the maturity to vote, is not supported by evidence. It applies just as well to many adults who already vote, and nobody applies it to the other legal rights and responsibilities 16-year-olds already carry.
For this project, the argument for votes at 16 is about who bears the consequences. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are directly affected by housing costs, education debt, insecure work and environmental damage, yet they have no say in decisions that will shape the decades they will live through. Adding around 1.5 million voters whose interests run against the status quo changes the electoral arithmetic on every major issue this project addresses.
Reduce the voting age to 16 for all UK elections, with automatic voter registration at 16. Make non-partisan civic education a statutory part of the national curriculum, covering how the political system works, how public spending is allocated, and how to evaluate political claims.
3.4 Citizens' Assemblies and Direct Democracy
A citizens' assembly is a group chosen by stratified random sampling to represent the public. It hears expert evidence, takes time to deliberate, and makes recommendations. The model has a strong record. Ireland's 2015 equal marriage referendum grew out of its Constitutional Convention, and its 2018 abortion referendum out of its Citizens' Assembly. The UK's Climate Assembly produced thoughtful, evidence-based recommendations that cut across party lines.
The model suits big questions such as the voting system, the pension settlement and the housing system, because on these elected politicians have conflicts of interest. A Parliament of property-owning MPs cannot be expected to reform housing without a mandate from outside. A Parliament that depends on pensioner votes will not reform the triple lock without democratic cover. Citizens' assemblies supply both.
Establish a permanent Citizens' Assembly Commission with a rolling mandate to examine long-term policy questions referred by Parliament or triggered by public petition. Assemblies to be stratified by age, region, gender, and socioeconomic background. Their recommendations to be debated in Parliament within six months and, where they propose constitutional change, put to a public referendum.
4. The House of Lords: An Institution Designed to Resist This Project
The House of Lords is the second largest legislative chamber in the world after China's National People's Congress. It costs £143.8 million a year. Its members are not elected, and most serve for life. No institution in the UK has a greater stake in blocking the reforms this project argues for.
That last point needs explaining. The Generational Reset argues for redistributing inherited wealth, reforming a planning system that has produced huge property windfalls, making the financial interests of people in public life transparent, and changing the political system that has protected all of these. Taken as a group, members of the Lords are among the main beneficiaries of those arrangements. They did not compete for their seats. They hold them through religious office or prime ministerial patronage, and until 2026 some held them by birth.16 They have no constituency to answer to and face no electoral consequence for how they vote. The institution is not a neutral party to the debate this project wants to have.
4.1 The Numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| £143.8m | Annual cost of the House of Lords in 2023-24, excluding depreciation and capital items |
| 798 | Members in October 2026, after the remaining hereditary peers left under the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026. Still the largest unelected legislative chamber in any democracy |
| £361 | Tax-free daily attendance allowance each peer can claim for each sitting day |
| 58 | Peers who sat at some point between April 2015 and early 2022 without attending once17 |
| 115 | Lords who did not speak at all in the 2016-17 session, one in seven, claiming an average of £11,091 each |
| 1 | Peer who claimed almost £50,000 in attendance expenses covering every sitting day, without ever speaking or tabling a written question |
| About a quarter | Life peers aged 80 or over (177 of 715 in November 2024), around four times the share among UK adults18 |
| 26 | Church of England bishops with automatic seats: one per 88,500 Christmas churchgoers, in a secular country of 48.2 million voters |
| 0 | Peers who face electoral consequences for any vote they cast |
4.2 The Patronage Problem
Life peers are appointed by the Crown on the advice of the Prime Minister. In practice, prime ministers have used appointments to reward donors, allies and party loyalists. The result is a chamber with no electoral mandate, filled with party appointees whose first loyalty is to the leader who put them there. Boris Johnson created 68 peerages by March 2023, against Theresa May's 46, before his resignation honours added more, including donors, former advisers and political allies.17 The House of Lords Appointments Commission advises on propriety but cannot block a prime minister's nominations.
So the chamber is presented as a source of independent expertise and scrutiny while working, in practice, as a resource for the executive. A government that has appointed enough peers can pass legislation through the Lords with little resistance. One that has not, cannot. The chamber's independence depends on arithmetic, not principle.
4.3 The Conflict of Interest at Scale
The Public Office Covenant pillar argues for mandatory financial disclosure because conflicts of interest in public life come from how the system is built, not from a few bad individuals. Explicit corruption is unnecessary when decision-makers' interests already line up with the decisions they make. The House of Lords is the clearest example of this in British public life.
The chamber includes many property developers, financial services professionals, former energy executives and people with large inherited fortunes. They vote on planning reform, financial regulation, energy policy and inheritance tax, with no duty to declare an interest or step aside. That is a conflict of interest written into the constitution, not a scrutiny chamber. The Covenant's transparency rules would apply here more directly than anywhere else in the political system, and peers are not currently bound by them.
4.4 What Should Replace It: An Open Question
The Generational Reset does not claim to have solved the design problem of replacing the Lords. It is a hard problem, and reasonable people disagree. What we can set out are the principles any replacement must meet, and the options worth serious consideration.
Principles any replacement must satisfy
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Democratic legitimacy: members must hold their place through some form of public mandate, selection, or transparent appointment process free from prime ministerial patronage
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Fixed terms with no renewal: five years is a reasonable working model. Temporary service keeps the expertise without creating a permanent political class in the second chamber. It is closer to jury service or a citizens' assembly than to a career, and it changes members' incentives completely
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A scrutiny role, not a rival mandate: the chamber's job should be to review, amend, and require the Commons to think again, not to initiate legislation or decide the government's survival
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Members drawn from across public life, including education, health, public service, business, civil society and science, and from a wider, more representative pool than today's institutional leadership
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No prime ministerial patronage: appointments, elections or selections must be run by a process independent of the executive
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A size that fits the job: a scrutiny chamber of 200 to 300 members is enough for its constitutional role. Nearly 800 members is not a scrutiny chamber. It is a subsidy programme.
Options for serious consideration
An elected second chamber is the most obviously democratic answer: elected by proportional representation, on a regional basis, with staggered five-year terms. The objection is that a second chamber with its own mandate invites deadlock between the two houses and weakens scrutiny, because elected members pursue their own platforms instead of scrutinising the Commons.
A functional chamber, elected from defined pools covering education, health, public services, business and civil society, keeps expertise while gaining legitimacy through election. The Irish Seanad works on a version of this idea, though it is widely seen as falling short of its original purpose. The hard design questions are who defines the pools, how to make representation within them diverse, and how to handle conflicts of interest when sector representatives vote on laws affecting their own sectors. Five-year non-renewable terms are essential to this model. They stop career politicians forming inside the chamber while keeping practical expertise.
A reformed appointed chamber, with an appointments commission free of prime ministerial direction and a much wider pool than today's life peerages, keeps the expertise without an elected chamber's rival mandate. It does not, however, solve the legitimacy problem.
Abolition, moving to a single chamber as in New Zealand and the Nordic countries, concentrates scrutiny in the Commons and ends the anomaly of an unelected chamber with real legislative power. Scrutiny would move to well-resourced parliamentary committees with independence and powers of investigation. This option makes most sense alongside proportional representation. A single-chamber Parliament elected by PR, with strong committees, has more democratic legitimacy than the current system, in which one of the two chambers has no mandate at all.
The one option that should not be on the table is the status quo. Picture a chamber of nearly 800 unelected members, costing £143.8 million a year and filled largely by prime ministerial patronage. Its members can claim tax-free attendance allowances while barely speaking, voting or contributing, and they have a bigger stake than any other institution in blocking the reforms this project argues for. That is a problem, tolerated for a century because the people with the power to change it are the people it benefits.
5. Counter-Arguments: The Strongest Objections
'Political Renewal is a distraction from the real issues'
This is the most common objection, and it gets the logic backwards. Political Renewal is the precondition for fixing the NHS, housing and welfare. Almost every major reform proposed in the other pillars has been known, evidenced and argued for, in some cases for decades. The Dilnot social care proposals date from 2011. The case for PR has been made since the early twentieth century, and proportional systems outperform FPTP in the countries that use them. The question is why these reforms have never been implemented, and the answer lies in how the political system works.
'Changing the electoral system would be permanently destabilising'
Moving to a new electoral system is complicated and needs a period of adjustment. That is a real cost. It has to be weighed against the cost of the current system: thirty years of inconsistent economic strategy, a housing crisis four decades in the making, and a welfare system that has drifted from its purpose with no democratic mandate to correct it. The costs of transition are limited and short-term. The costs of the status quo have no limit and keep growing.
'Politicians will never vote to change the system that elected them'
This is the strongest practical objection. It is why this pillar proposes citizens' assemblies rather than parliamentary commissions to design the change. A citizens' assembly's recommendation carries a democratic legitimacy that a parliamentary vote on the same question lacks. A referendum on that recommendation, especially one backed by a clear public majority, makes it possible for even a Parliament elected under FPTP to deliver the change without political suicide.
Cross-Pillar Dependencies
Political Renewal is not one pillar among many. Every other pillar depends on it to be deliverable. The connections are set out below.
| Pillar | Connection |
|---|---|
| Public Office Covenant | The Covenant complements this pillar from the inside. Political Renewal removes capture of the system from outside: private money and distorted representation. The Covenant removes capture from within: conflicts of interest, the revolving door, and self-enrichment in office treated as normal. Together they close the loop. |
| Economy | The UK's chronic underinvestment in productive capital, infrastructure and regional development is mainly a political failure, not an economic one. Short electoral cycles, donors with an interest in financialisation, and safe seats shielded from economic decline in poorer regions all lead to the same place: no twenty-year economic strategy lasts long enough to pay off. PR, and the longer horizons of coalition government, make the Economy pillar's patient-capital argument possible. |
| NHS | NICE thresholds, the stalemate on social care and the GP workforce shortfall have all been politically manageable under FPTP, because the costs fall on people with little political voice and the benefits of change would be spread thin and slow to arrive. Electoral reform changes the politics of NHS funding by removing the safe-seat protection that lets the status quo persist without electoral cost. |
| Education | No UK education strategy has survived more than two parliaments. The five-year electoral cycle is the main reason twenty-year reforms (professionalising teaching, investing in early years, building a truly comprehensive system) never have time to work. PR, by producing coalitions with shared medium-term agendas, lengthens the time horizon for education investment. |
| Defence | Defence procurement failures such as Ajax, Nimrod and the Type 45 power systems persist partly because the MoD escapes the democratic accountability that a properly functioning Parliament would impose. Independent acquisition authority and transparent programme reporting need the accountability mechanisms this pillar sets up. |
| Public Debt | The Generational Debt Statement, which would require every budget to acknowledge what it passes to future generations, needs a Parliament willing to bind itself. The current-account balance target needs cross-party commitment, which PR makes far more achievable than a system of alternating majority governments with opposing fiscal views. |
| Energy | Long-term energy decisions, from the North Sea transition to grid investment and offshore wind industrial strategy, need political commitment beyond a five-year cycle. The independent mandates that protect these investments from reversal after each election are more credible when the political system behind them rewards longer time horizons. |
| Welfare | The welfare system's tilt toward older, wealthier voters is the most direct expression of the electoral arithmetic this pillar addresses. The triple lock, the two-child benefit cap and the Local Housing Allowance freeze all reflect the voting weight of particular age groups under FPTP. Proportional representation, votes at 16, and citizens' assemblies selected to reflect every age group are central to welfare reform, because they are how the system's democratic distortion gets corrected. |
| Criminal Justice | The collapse of legal aid, the court backlog and the record prison population all reflect political decisions that put costs on people with little political voice. Under FPTP, criminal justice spending is the first to be cut and the last to be restored, because those who bear the consequences (defendants, victims in deprived communities, people released without rehabilitation) are not a decisive bloc in marginal seats. |
| Housing | The housing crisis has lasted four decades even though the solutions are known, because the people who would have to implement them, property-owning MPs representing homeowning voters, have no electoral reason to act. PR ends safe seats. Votes at 16 adds 1.5 million voters directly harmed by housing costs. These links are concrete: they are how the housing crisis has been kept in place politically. |
7. Proposals for Change
These are the core proposals of this pillar. They are not a programme for government. They are the case for change that this project invites the public to consider, challenge and build on.
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Introduce proportional representation for Westminster elections through a citizens' assembly process, with the assembly's recommendation put to a public referendum. The specific system (STV, AMS, or party list) to be chosen through deliberation, not party preference.
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Cap individual political donations at £500 per year. Introduce full public funding for parties clearing 2% of the national vote. Require real-time disclosure of all donations above £100. Enforce equal broadcasting time during election campaigns.
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Close the revolving door with a statutory five-year cooling-off period between government positions and roles in regulated industries, enforced by an independent body with real powers to impose sanctions.
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Reduce the voting age to 16 for all UK elections, with automatic registration at 16. Make non-partisan civic education a statutory part of the national curriculum.
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Establish a permanent Citizens' Assembly Commission to examine long-term policy questions, with assemblies selected to reflect the UK's full range of age, region, gender and socioeconomic background. Recommendations to be debated in Parliament within six months, and put to a referendum where they propose constitutional change.
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P6 Introduce fixed-term Parliaments with a five-year cycle that the Prime Minister cannot cut short by calling an election for political advantage. Separate the executive's dissolution power from Parliament's mandate.
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Require publication, within 30 days, of all ministerial meetings with outside parties, all lobbying contacts, and all decisions where a minister has a potential financial conflict of interest.
Political Renewal is not the most glamorous argument in this project. It does not promise immediate change in any particular policy area. What it offers is a way for the changes argued for in every other pillar to be delivered, instead of being known, evidenced, argued for, and blocked again and again by a system that was never designed to allow them. That is the argument, and readers are invited to challenge it.
The Generational Reset is a non-partisan, public-interest project. It is not affiliated with any political party, does not accept corporate funding, and publishes all its work under open licence for public discussion and adaptation.
For public discussion. Not affiliated with any political party. | generationalreset.org
The Generational Reset | S2_01: Political Renewal | For public discussion. Not affiliated with any political party. | generationalreset.org