Consumer champion Martin Lewis has launched a crusade to combat “life’s potholes” and is asking the public to suggest small bugbears that, if solved, could make a big difference.
The MoneySavingExpert.com founder told the Mirror: “We shouldn’t underestimate the impact of small stuff on people’s lives. Anything that is unnecessarily adding friction to the system is what we’re really looking to fix. It’s glitches in the system, or life’s potholes is how I call it. It’s just like ‘how does it work this way? - it makes no sense.’”
Funding and organisation
Martin has set up and is funding The Small Ideas Initiative, which will gather suggestions from the public, charities and others. It has been established with a £175,000 personal donation to two organising charities - Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence and Involve.
The deadline for suggestions is November 12. Ideas cannot be too local, overtly political, illegal or harmful.
Selection process and examples
With the help of a cross-party panel - which includes representatives from Reform UK through to the Green party - around 50 ideas will be selected and spearheaded with policies that could be enacted.
One example of a success already achieved is for all local authorities to have the same application form and process for vulnerable people to apply for council tax reductions, allowing for universal guidance and boosting take-up.
Other ideas include having live alerts on beaches for sewage spills, introducing standardised allergy displays on menus, and having a streamlined system for reporting anti-social behaviour to the police and local councils, rather than separately.
Motivation and aims
Martin says he has been considering how to tackle smaller problems that should be simple to sort for 20 years, but almost all that time in the money sector. “But for the last couple of years it’s been getting into my head that there’s a lot of other stuff out there,” he said.
He decided to take it further after doing a fringe event at last year’s Labour party conference, when he was asked what he would have advised the new government ahead of gaining power. “I said I’d pick 100 small things that piss people off, and I would fix one a day for the first 100 days,” he recalls. “Because what people want to see from politicians is, you are making a difference.”
The aim extends beyond Martin’s expertise in finance to any area of everyday life. Underpinning it is that the solution shouldn’t cost much - and could well save money - and that the ideas aren’t politically problematic.
Martin explains: “We're not looking for you to tell us what's wrong, we're looking for how it can simply be fixed. I hope it will be a democratisation of good, small ideas. If we do 50 of these things it gives people more time to work or have fun, both of which are really good for the individual and the economy.”
