Questions put to those who decide
Too much about how and where you live and what your country does is decided without you. We publish questions, from social and economic ideas where people live and work, to national and global ways to improve everyone’s way of life.
And we publish the answers. Each question goes to the person with the power to decide, and what they did next is recorded, including nothing. Public Answers is built for any country. Its first question is in England and Wales, because that is where the evidence it started with was gathered.
The founding question, open now
Is civil law fair in England and Wales?
One rule decides how every civil case in England and Wales is run. Nobody has ever been asked whether it is right.
Fairness should not be traded for cost. One sentence in one rule, asked of the Civil Procedure Rule Committee.
What comes back
Every question sent is listed on the response register with what the decision-maker said, or the fact that nothing was said by the date. That list is the measure this programme asks to be judged by.
What people are raising
Live politics shows what people in the UK and across the world are signing, looking up and posting about on eleven topics, beside the latest official figures. It counts topics, never people. See Live politics.
Who is behind this
Stuart Thompson, engineer and inventor. He recalls being told that a camera nobody watches could not be built. He built it, patented it in Europe and America, and used it to pioneer one of the world’s first AI markets, now forecast to pass $100 billion by 2035. He also runs Fairness First, a campaign to put fairness above cost in the rule that governs every civil case in England and Wales. The pattern is the same each time: find the question people will say yes to, build to it, measure it, publish the measurement.
If you have never been asked
Polls ask a thousand strangers a question they did not choose. Consultations arrive after the decision. This is the opposite: your place, your question, your reason, on the record.
If you were asked and nothing happened
You answered a survey, signed a petition, went to a meeting. Nothing changed and nobody told you why. Here the question, the answer and the response are on one page, in public, so silence is visible too.
The working groups behind each question are the engine under the bonnet. How it works, step by step.
What one looks like
No working group has reported yet. This is the layout every one of them will use.
Two things you can do
About two minutes
Publish a question
Tell us the place and the question. A person checks it and it is published. If enough people there back it, a working group opens.
One email address
Follow the first working groups
We tell you when a group opens, when it reports, and what the decision-maker did. Nothing else.
Our targets
Every working group that reports in the first twelve months appears here with a published result and a recorded response. The number we are working to is set when the first group opens and published on this page with the date it was set.
Public Answers is a programme of Global SafetyWatch. It is not connected to any political party and does not support or oppose any party or candidate. It is not connected to any government body. Every published figure carries its source, and any estimate is labelled as one. Nothing on this site is legal advice. Translations are automatic and may be inaccurate; the English text is the one we stand behind.