The Commissioners

The Commission plays an important role in our proposed system and the selection of the commissioners needs care. We offer here one possible method of selecting Commissioners.

As the Constitutional Commission is envisaged as only being a small committee, with perhaps as few as ten people serving for only two years, it is difficult to find a process that would enable 2,250,000 voters in Wales to choose just ten commissioners. One possible process would be to have them selected by lot. This would be an easy operation to set up, as we would use the existing 40 electoral constituencies as a starting point. One hundred people could be selected by lot from each constiuency. These one hundred people would chose one to be the delegate from their area. The commissioners would be chosen from amongst the delegates by the delegates themselves. They would select the Commissioners for the first two year period, after which time the commissioners must retire, and then the delegates would select their successors. At the next Assembly election all delegates must stand down and a new group of delegates must be selected. The aim is to create a citizens jury rather than another party political battleground, or a Supreme Court. The Commissioners would not be busy as silly suggestions would not obtain the required number of signatures, and good proposals could not be resisted by the parties without losing votes at elections.

Once the Commissioners have been selected they must be independent from the Assembly and the political parties, if they are going to truly serve the interests of the people. In order to ensure this, a code of practice could be put into place to guarantee the neutrality of the Commissioners.

The Civil Service Code provides us with an example of such a code. It defines four core values that civil servants must adhere to: integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. We would expect our commissioners to follow these four values. Furthermore, our commissioners would be strictly non-political, they could not be, or have been, members of political parties or any other political organization that could compromise their neutrality.