Jeremy Hunt to offer £1 million to the creator of a website to "harness the wisdom" of the British people on policy

Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced today that a Conservative Government would offer a £1 miilion prize - from Cabinet Office funds - to a person or persons who can create a website that would be able to take account of the "collective wisdom of the British people" when it comes to making policy.

According to the Press Association report:

Announcing the cash prize, which would be taken from the Cabinet Office budget, the party said it believed "the collective wisdom of the British people is much greater than that of a bunch of politicians or so-called experts".

It would be paid to the individual or team "that develops a platform that enables large groups of people to come together online to solve common problems and develop new policies". The competition is modelled on the use of the online science community by pharmaceutical firms to solve problems as part of their development of new products.

Mr Hunt told the Today progamme this morning:

"Look at the U-turns over child care vouchers, over the 10p tax, over the NHS IT system. It is crazy that these things have gone wrong when you've got lots and lots of retired health professionals, retired policemen, people in the teaching profession, who have huge knowledge and expertise and had they been able to contribute better to the policy-making process we could have avoided some of these problems.

"What we are trying to find is: is there a way that we can use the internet - it's a means to an end not an end in itself - to try and avoid some of these howlers so a future Conservative government can not just have good policy ideas but execute policy in a much more considered and thought-through way."

"We will only give this money away ... if we get a solution. One of the innovative things about this idea is that it is a prize so someone will actually have to deliver the entire product, working, functioning."

Jonathan Isaby