Appropriately enough, the Government published its plans for dumping the aristocracy on Bastille Day. The revolution itself, however, is likely to be postponed.

The White Paper An Elected Second Chamber was published (pdf) yesterday, and contains proposals to remove the last vestiges of hereditary membership from Parliament’s second chamber.

It proposes:

• Elections for the new body, probably called a Senate, from multi-member constituencies
• Senators would serve for one term only, but their term would be three parliamentary cycles - between twelve and fifteen years
• A smaller house - down to about 450
• A possibility of some appointed Senators, also serving three-Parliament terms
• Some appointed seats (if there were any) would be reserved for bishops and judges

Reaction has varied. The Telegraph, perhaps unsurprisingly, is in favour of the status quo, while the Guardian thinks change can’t happen soon enough.

Anything that moves Parliament towards being a properly elected body is to be welcomed, but it is rather a shame that having had years of delay on this issue, we are now promised a bit more. The Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, said in his statement to the Commons that there would be no legislation on the issue in this Parliament.

Given the current state of the opinion polls, and the likelihood that the Conservatives will not move forward on reform with much enthusiasm when they are in power, this may be putting off the start of the transition for a decade or more. Even if reform is enacted in 2011 after a general election, the first new elected members would not be through the doors until the next one, in 2014 or later. Their Lordships don’t need to fire up the Guardian Jobs pages just yet.

The Ministry of Justice published their thoughts on national-level citizen engagement in a consultation paper published yesterday.

The consultation on the Empowerment Fund - the £7.5m pot to be doled out by the Government in support of the Empowerment White Paper’s aims - has been published.

The contents aren’t good news for small, community organisations - at least, not directly. To bid for the fund at all organisations have to demonstrate a turnover of £250,000 per annum, and to bid for the maximum amount you need an income of £400,000 p.a.

There are participation initiatives here in Brighton that don’t clear £2.50 a year, let alone £250,000.

This big-solutions big-bucks approach is disappointing not just because we at the Society don’t turn over a quarter of a million pounds a year, though we’d like to. It’s more that big, hulking organisations with big chunks of funding tend to produce big, expensive solutions that have only limited appeal, and are hard to adapt to local circumstances. I’d much rather have had 1,000 projects each funded with £7,500.

I suppose smaller groups will need to look to the more ground-level CommunityBuilders fund, on which we await details, and the Office of the Third Sector’s Grassroots Grants.

The Empowerment White Paper is out, and a summary is available here as a PDF. The full monty is here and is accompanied by a separate Evidence Annex

I’ve read the summary, and although it’s not earth shatteringly radical there are a few good ideas. In particular, it has a helpfully political take on citizenship- it sees the citizen primarily as a political actor rather than merely a consumer of government services.

Here are a few instant personal reactions.

Definitely good things:

• the duty on councils to respond to petitions, and ability for petitioners to force debates in full council where responses aren’t satisfactory
• public sessions to quiz leaders of public sector bodies such as hospital trusts
• £7.5m to support empowerment, as long as it’s used wisely
• community pledgebanks (hello, Tom)

Interesting ideas, but risky or unproven:

• participatory budgeting in every council

• community asset transfer
• changes to rules on political neutrality of local government officials (to increase the number of people standing for election as councillors)
• a duty on councils to promote democracy
• removing barriers to commissioning from faith-based groups
• community justice. It sounds rather like ‘people’s lynchmobs’ but means that community service orders will be more obviously linked to areas where local people think work is needed

Disappointments:

• the obvious padding - if the executive summary includes a pledge to continue working with various forms of media, the writers must have been running short of ideas

• the absence of anything really radical or directive around neighbourhood councils or involvement
• incentives for voting, which makes my toes curl - if you need to be given a scratchcard to vote, perhaps you don’t understand why it’s important

Involve are running a short survey online, to

“inform how government and local authorities engage the third sector in decision making in the future. The findings of the survey will feed into the production of a report and online toolkit to help public bodies make the most of the unique skills and expertise that the third sector can offer.”

Take it here.

The Government has published a consultation document, Unlocking Talent that covers a range of community-building ideas, including support for local democracy and participation. The Society will be writing a response to the consultation.

Sure, we could have posted a hundred examples of consultations that get hardly any responses, but this story from Manchester a few weeks back is interesting because it was to do with the Council’s budget - hardly a small issue, even if it is hard to present interestingly.

The Society has submitted this response to this UK Government consultation.