Democracy Matters: A Constitutional Assembly for the UK- A Comparative Study and Pilot Project

苏格兰独立公投后，英国正处于快速的宪政反思和改革时期。史密斯委员会已经为苏格兰议会制定了一系列新的权力，英格兰的权力下放已经采取了一些双边“城市协议”的形式，内阁权力下放委员会（由威廉·黑格主持）已经报告了威斯敏斯特的改革方案。尽管首相在2014年9月18日的声明中强调：“在如何改善英国的治理方面，我们有更广泛的公民参与也是很重要的，包括如何赋予我们伟大的城市权力。”但在这一狂热的改革时期，一个关键因素是缺乏任何明确的或可管理的公民参与过程。在接下来的几天里，我们将对此进行更多的讨论。”通过国家媒体上的一些信件、学术界和第三部门资深人士的呼吁，甚至向总理提出的一份重要请愿书，推动了公民领导的制宪会议的建立。2015年12月5日，威廉·黑格回应了这一压力，他发表了一封公开信，致一些申请这项研究经费的个人和团体。他在公开信中承认，尽管联合政府在短期内专注于权力下放，但仍需要一个更广泛的公众参与过程，将宪法体系作为一个整体。黑格承认，“制宪会议是实现这一目标的一种方式”。工党已经正式承诺，如果在下届大选后组建政府，将启动制宪会议，自由民主党、英国独立党和绿党也将其作为未来计划的核心要素，使其成为一个真正的跨党派问题。因此，举行制宪会议的问题已经从英国宪法辩论的边缘转移到了核心。2015年5月7日之后可能出现一个悬浮议会，组建联合政府所需的党派间协议，以及需要解决的尚未解决的宪法问题，使得建立制宪会议的可能性更大。这种应用的紧迫性——因此也是基本原理——在于，政府核心存在着重大的技能和知识差距。内阁府在如何设计、管理或实施公众主导的重大民主创新方面没有专业知识。相比之下，其他国家和区域进行了审议性的公众协商活动- -最明显的是荷兰、冰岛、加拿大和爱尔兰共和国组织了制宪会议。因此，它们提供了宝贵的经验和见解，需要在英国内部加以利用。我们还需要将这些见解应用到英国的试点项目中，不仅要测试它们在国家之间和国家之间的普遍性，还要测试它们从之前规模相对较小的实验扩展到一个拥有6410万人口的国家的能力。需要让这些基于英国的测试用例启动并运行，以便他们的发现可以为2015年底建立公民大会的未来计划提供信息，这增加了一种紧迫性，使该应用程序超出了标准响应模式的应用程序流程，其决策过程需要26周。这项研究将围绕英国权力下放的主题运行两个试点宪法大会。他们将讨论如何实现公民参与的问题，权力应该在英国各国之间和内部分布在哪里，并将作为“概念验证”的活动组织起来，具有重大的潜力，可以影响下一届英国政府关于如何委托和执行制宪会议的决定。

In the wake of the Scottish referendum on independence the UK is undergoing a rapid period of constitutional reflection and reform. The Smith Commission has set out a raft of new powers for the Scottish Parliament, English devolution has taken the form of a number of bi-lateral 'city deals', and Cabinet Committee on Devolved Powers (chaired by William Hague) has reported on options for change in Westminster. One critical component of this frenetic period of reform has been the absence of any explicit or managed process for civic engagement even though the Prime Minister's statement on the 18 September 2014 emphasized that 'It is also important we have wider civic engagement about how to improve governance in our United Kingdom, including how to empower our great cities. And we will say more about this in the coming days'. The creation of a citizen-led Constitutional Convention has been promoted through a number of letters in the national media, calls from senior figures within academe and the third sector and even a major petition to the Prime Minister. On the 5 Dec. 2015 William Hague responded to this pressure by publishing an open letter to some of the individuals and groups making this research grant application in which he conceded that although the coalition government was focusing on the delivery of devolution in the short-term there would be a need for a broader process of public engagement about the constitutional system as a whole. 'A constitutional convention' Mr Hague acknowledged 'is one way of doing this'. The Labour Party has formally committed itself to launching a Constitutional Convention if it forms the government after the next General Election and the Liberal Democrats, UKIP and the Green Party have also made this a core element of their plans for the future, making this a genuine cross-party issue. The issue of holding a Constitutional Convention has therefore shifted from the periphery of constitutional debates in the UK to the very core. The likelihood of a hung parliament after 7 May 2015 and the inter-party deals that will be required to form a coalition plus the existence of unresolved constitutional questions that require resolution makes the establishment of a constitutional convention more likely. The urgency - and therefore rationale - for this application is that a major skills and knowledge gap exists at the centre of government. The Cabinet Office has no specialist knowledge in terms of how to design, manage or implement major public-led democratic innovations. Other countries and regions, by contrast, have undertaken deliberative public consultative exercises - most notably the Netherlands, Iceland, Canada and Republic of Ireland have organized constitutional assemblies. As such, they offer valuable lessons and insights that need to be harnessed within the UK. There is also a major need to take these insights and feed them into pilot projects in the UK to test not only their generalizability across and between countries but also their capacity to be scaled-up from the comparatively smaller scale of previous experiments to a country with 64.1 million people. The need to get these UK-based test cases up and running so that their findings could inform future plans to establish a Citizens Assembly in late 2015 adds an urgency that pushes this application beyond the standard response mode application process with its 26 week decision-making process. This research will run two pilot constitutional assemblies around the theme of decentralisation in the UK. They will address the question of how civic engagement can be delivered, where power should lie across and within the nations of the UK and will be organised as a 'proof of concept' exercise with significant potential to influence the next UK government's decision on how to commission and execute a Constitutional Convention.