18 Bold Ideas from the Ashdown Prize

By Jim Williams | Thu 26th July 2018 - 10:25 am

More than 1,140 people entered the Ashdown Prize, organised earlier this year by Your Liberal Britain. Only ten of these ideas could make it onto the shortlist – but there were so many brilliant entries that we decided we had to celebrate and promote more of them.

The following are a list of Commended Entries. They are the personal picks of our shortlisters: ideas that didn’t make it to the final ten, but that are worthy of special praise.

Here they are, arranged alphabetically by author:

· Mental health assessment before military demobilisation – Adrian Grant

· National post-secondary learning entitlement – Alastair Thomson

· Link corporation tax to fair pay – Alex Wasyliw

· Compensate individuals for use of their data – Bansri Buddhdev

· Set up an NHS national lottery – Brian Morrison

· Prisoner voting and prison parish councils – Callum Robertson

· Establish a UK-wide Care Service – Charlie McCarthy

· Freedom of Information over public contracts – Dave Page

· Phase out non-recyclable plastics – Dave Parton-Ginno

· A new capital city for Britain – Drew Durning

· £1,000 trust for every child – James Thellusson

· Low-risk prisoners can keep their jobs – Jonathan Hunt

· Legal aid for suing the state – Jonathan Wilson

· Legalise a non-binary third gender – Natalie Bird

· Universal suffrage for all taxpayers – Richard Gregson

· Introduce credit cards that fund the NHS – Steve Grosvenor

· Calculate retirement age by life expectancy – Stuart Thompstone

· Tax relief on investments in the Developing World – Tom Arms

Congratulations to all!

If you’d like to help take any of these ideas forward, come to our Policy Lab at Autumn Conference. We’ll invite you to help putt ideas such as these (and any ideas you come prepared with) through their paces, so that we can all work together with other Lib Dems to polish radical ideas into practical policies.

We’re also going to launch later this year a forum to help Lib Dems develop policies together online. If you’d like to stay posted about that, sign up for our mailing list right here.

We’re now re-designing the Ashdown Prize for next year. You can read our review of what worked and what didn’t here, and you can send us your ideas for how to run next year’s competition here.

* Jim Williams is the founder of Your Liberal Britain

One Comment

Lorenzo Cherin 27th Jul '18 - 2:51pm

Jim

I am a frequent advocate for your work and the good folk at Your Liberal Britain.

I submitted an idea and developed it and in my view it unlike many, was not just a headline, but a real proposal for something that individuals would be empowered by.The point of the Prize was this.

My policy was for within the creative industry field but would have wider effects beneficial to development of a more social Liberal economics. Creativity and the arts are ignored or paid lip service too, or have a lot of public money chucked at an elite like the Arts Council ala Corbyn and his way. My entry was and is one I shall pursue within and apart from the party. The being locked out of the economy that so many innovators feel, due to lack of funds, is even worse than the feeling of being locked out of the polity for lack of power. I have begun to do something as a result of this, for example http://www.tomscabinthemanofhumanity.com and http://www.theliberalartscause.com

The reason competitions are no good is they single out based on certain pet likes or dislikes, there is no consistent approach, we are Liberal, thus there cannot be really can there?!

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