CITIZENLAB LAUNCHES OPEN SOURCE ENGAGEMENT TECH TO EMPOWER LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

Civic Tech platform CitizenLab is today announcing a move to open up the core version of its community engagement software, in an effort to equip smaller organisations and communities with the tools to democratise policy-making by involving more citizens. Available from March 31st, the open source code can be found on GitHub, enabling civic organisations to deploy and run their own virtual consultation projects, for free. 

CitizenLab’s technology allows people to make their voices heard using purpose built software designed to improve efficiency within civic decision-making. The platform provides governments, local authorities, and membership organisations with a ‘digital democracy toolbox’. This enables them to enrich community meetings with virtual discussion forums, organise votes on suggested policy changes, or gather new ideas through surveying tools. The civic engagement tools have been developed through a recognition of the need to improve outdated bureaucratic processes with innovative technology, increasing transparency and political participation. 

The open source software will be available through an AGPLv3 license, as demand for open software continues to grow amongst local governments. This will allow for the features to be made fully accessible and replicable, enabling organisations to deploy the platform on their own servers, make changes to the code, and power basic community engagement projects easily and efficiently. This move will mostly benefit small organisations and civic groups, who until now may not have been able to afford a licence. 

Founders - Wietse Van Ransbeeck, Aline Muylaert, and Koen Gremmelprez and team

Founders - Wietse Van Ransbeeck, Aline Muylaert, and Koen Gremmelprez and team

Larger clients and governments will continue to have access to paid-for licences, which come with technical support, guidance, and tailored advice. For larger institutions, the move to open source will be an opportunity to increase collaboration with their communities and develop custom integrations for their engagement projects. Organisations including Sport England, the Nursing and Midwifery Council, and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) have already embraced CitizenLab over the past few months, in a bid to ensure members’ and community voices are heard. 

“Our move to open source is a way to practice what we preach. We cannot credibly champion transparency and openness to the governments we work with, if we do not practice it ourselves, and if the underlying infrastructure is entirely closed-source. Democracy should not be left to the black-box algorithms of private companies - it belongs to all of us.

“We have also noticed that the demand for open source is growing amongst local governments. Making the move to open source will enable us to collaborate with governments on high-impact projects and provide adequate tools for online deliberation at a regional or national scale”.

Wietse Van Ransbeeck, CitizenLab’s

CitizenLab successfully launched in the UK in January 2020, and has previously worked with over 200 governments across 11 different countries to improve digital democracy. The decision to release an open source version of the software is reflective of CitizenLab’s willingness to prioritise  wider societal benefit over profit. 

Wietse Van Ransbeeck

Wietse Van Ransbeeck

THE UNTOLD SIDE EFFECTS OF COVID ON WOMEN

By Dr Sandesh Gulhane

We all know the devastation COVID has directly had on our health, from killing us to leaving us debilitated though long COVID, but for most people it is the indirect consequences that have caused the greatest suffering. Lockdown, social distancing, and the fear of COVID has deteriorated our mental health, stretched our finances to breaking point and turned 2020 in the year we all want to forget. But this impact has not been felt equally by all.  

It has been well documented that women earn less than their male counterparts across all sectors, but women also tend to hold less secure jobs, be much more likely to have work in the informal sector and also form the vast majority of single parent families. This is why women have a greater struggle against economic shocks than men. In the UK, mothers are 1.5 times more likely to have lost their job or quit than fathers during lockdown. Some of this has been caused by women home schooling their children. UCL found that women spent twice as long teaching their children whilst also bearing the brunt of childcare. This has led to women feeling their wellbeing was suffering with over 50% admitting they were struggling. This disparity was made abundantly evident through a Kings College London study that revealed men were more likely to be bored during lockdown whilst women feeling exhaustion. Of those women who continued to work throughout lockdown, many seemed to have very stressful jobs, with women making up 77% of healthcare workers, 83% social care, 92% childcare and 58% retail staff.   

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Women are also suffering from an exponential rise in domestic abuse globally. In the UK alone, 47 women are suspected to have been murdered during the first lockdown because of domestic abuse in figures released by the charity Counting Dead Women. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline saw a massive increase in calls it received during both lockdowns. The struggle for women is that they are trapped with their abuser and cannot reach out for help. The trend has been for technology to be used to control and intimidate, with the use of webcams, smart locks, and social media. 

A study in the Lancet found that women and those living with young children had the greatest risk of increased mental distress, whilst a government report showed women suffering worse anxiety and depression. This is borne out by what I am seeing in my surgery with increasing numbers of women presenting themselves to me in distress. This ranges from patients showing mild symptoms to actively suicidal thoughts, and as lockdown has progressed the numbers have been increasing. I am also concerned about the number of women who are feeling low and struggling but not coming forward and asking for help. The cardinal signs I want women to look for are: having a low mood more often than not over 2 weeks, a change in sleeping patterns, loss of energy or concentration, becoming easily irritable with others, an increased and consistent heartrate, and repeated anxiety. If you have any of these signs then please contact your GP and we can begin the process to help you. Educational institutions like Universities offer incredible support and employers can help by ensuring that they have educational programmes about mental health, target gender inequality across their company, give staff access to helplines and support at an early stage.  

The recent tragic case of Sarah Everard has triggered a much needed debate on women’s safety and how vulnerable they can be but we need to ensure that domestic issues that often go unseen are also discussed. More must be done to narrow and eliminate the gender disparity in our society as that is the only way we can ever hope to be a fair civilization.

Dr Sandesh Gulhane

Dr Sandesh Gulhane

LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD FOR HOME OWNERSHIP

By Emma Best

I grew up during the era of Blair on an estate in a deprived area of London. What surrounded me was a generation of vulnerable families trapped on the drip tap of the state, demoralised and resigned to the constraints of life supported by welfare. This shaped my view of politics and the importance of empowering people through policy that, at the earliest point, gives them the opportunity to control their future.

My proposal aims to do this through a reformation of tax policy for young people that would not only make home ownership accessible but also incentivise employment. Under the working title of the ‘Youth Boost’ this policy presents the opportunity to truly put home ownership in the grasp of all young people.

“The cost of living for young people is made more expensive by government intervention and that by taking less away from young people through the tax system, then you would help them save for things like a house.” Chloe Westley

With strong voices in government and throughout the Conservative Party recognising the need to accelerate homeownership and not allow tax to make life unduly hard for young people, the time is right to pitch this policy to sympathetic ears.

The Youth Boost would effectively eradicate basic rate tax for under 25s up to the value of £10,000 by allowing them to claim back these payments for a deposit on a home. Once £10,000 had been accumulated they’d begin to pay basic rate tax again and any higher rate tax would still be paid in a tax year (even if the £10,000 cap had not yet been reached).

While schemes such as ‘Shared Ownership’ and ‘Help to Buy’ opened up the housing market to many who previously found it unobtainable they still exclude those living week to week, or month to month, unable to save at all. Help to Buy, whilst extremely successful, has faced criticism for inflating prices within the new-build market; putting money in the hands of developers as opposed to those looking to climb onto the housing ladder. The Youth Boost would avoid this and with Help to Buy winding down to its end in 2023, now represents the perfect time to invest in this scheme which would truly stimulate social mobility. 

Why £10,000?

The average 18 – 24-year-old earns £22,059 per annum. Over seven years paying tax on this salary your total tax bill would be £10,871. Via a 95% LTV mortgage or 5% deposit shared ownership scheme that would provide a budget to look to buy at £200,000 or, if in a couple, £400,000. The average price of all UK properties is £239,000 (Office for National Statistics, 2020) which puts starter homes within budget. With this price bracket in mind developers will more likely begin to bend towards the needs of young people. The feasibility of young people entering the housing market in large numbers with their purses (or wallets) full also means developers will look to appeal to their needs. In the 80s home ownership sky-rocketed from 57% to 68% by the end of the decade thanks in much part due to Thatcher’s revolutionary ‘Right to Buy’ policy. By the early 2000s home ownership was over 70% but has consistently dropped with the emergence of generation rent. On the watch of a Conservative government we cannot allow this to be our legacy.

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Stable ties to a community create a wide-ranging plethora of social benefits and also increase one’s personal and financial security. In 2020, research released by Halifax showed that homeowners were up to £3,700 better off per year than renters, demonstrating that in the modern age the financial benefit of home ownership is not only realised in the future but also in the here and now.

The existence of large transient populations must be built on the desire to be free to move and live wherever – not an inability to form stable roots through financial insecurity. One of the main benefits of this policy is that it also incentivises entering the working world. For young people the employment market is often unattractive with a prominence of vacancies in inflexible, unstable and low-paid positions.  While there is no silver bullet for tackling the 7% fall in youth employment caused by the coronavirus pandemic, one issue that must be addressed is motivation to work which the effective pay- rise of this proposal provides.  

The big question, of course, is how can we afford it? It’s all well and good talking of spending money to solve an issue – but investing amidst the backdrop of recession recovery is another thing. We must invest in certain areas though, and as we look to ‘build, build, build’ our way to economic stability, this policy would certainly help stimulate the construction industry. The eligible ‘Youth Boost’ accumulated for one person over a year could range from £1 - £7,498. To come to some idea of what this means on a year- to-year basis I’m applying the tax payments from an average salary for under 25s to all 3.51 million under 25s in work. That theoretically presents a total of £6.8bn per annum (0.8% of the UK’s £828bn tax bill) that could – at some point - be reclaimed. The UK currently pays £783,734,400 in unemployment benefits to under 25s each year and this potential boost to employment could help reduce these costs significantly.

Additionally, the UK foots a bill of £18bn per annum for housing benefit. Home ownership provides families with financial security for generations and in decades to come the uplift in asset ownership could foreseeably cause a dip in these payments. The cost of Help to Buy has been £16.05bn so far. The Youth Boost could replace it with previous investment into Help to Buy redirected. It also is true that Help to Buy could begin to realise returns in the future which could be re-invested.

The government could look to separate the ‘Youth Boost’ tax payments and allow the UKGI to manage these in order to maximise potential of the fund before it is paid out. No doubt the scheme would have to be identified as a flagship policy worth investing in. However, even if this policy launched tomorrow claims for £10,000 from every young person in the country would not be made overnight. There’d need to be further modelling to project scale of claims in coming years, but this scheme could be steadily invested in over the next few years in preparation.  

Margaret Thatcher was a trail blazer who smashed down the barriers between class and home ownership with Right to Buy; the foundation of social mobility for a whole generation. It is within our grasp, as modern Conservatives, to take the next revolutionary step. I would implore you to consider the wave of change this proposal could allow for where the surface has only begun to be scratched in this article.

Emma Best