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.