The Jury decides the envelope
Street type, typology list, reserved-stock floor, amenity closures, levy redesign. Sortition, overlapping terms, nearby streets weighted on siting. If the panel is wrong, the street pays — and can tell within a year.
Governance synthesis
How the borough is governed
AICB supplies the legal body and the land. Networked Commons Governance supplies the rules that stop that body becoming another captured machine.
The stack at a glance
Crown in Parliament
Enabling Act · Letters Patent · reserved national functions
Charter Borough Trust Corporation
Holds the land in trust · not a Crown servant
Steward
Delivers
Court
Appoints and sets levy
Jury
Sets the envelope
Trust
Holds reserved stock
The original Charter Borough design is strong on delivery: a professional executive, a City-of-London-style dual franchise, by-right Pattern Book development, land-value capture, and an arbitral tribunal instead of a judicial-review cascade.
What it still needed — and what NCG supplies — is a civic layer that cannot be colonised by the executive or by the largest commercial voter. Sortition, liquid delegation, Forced Construction, and public trust audits are that layer.
What both still needed — and what Guiting Power supplies — is a social commons that keeps the place inhabited by the people who work it, rather than emptied into a second-home or commuter shell after the first uplift.
The stack
Layer 1
Crown in Parliament
Sovereignty is not pretended away. An enabling Act authorises Letters Patent. Defence, borders, currency, and indictable crime remain national. The Meta-Commons functions enumerated in the NCG Charter stay thin and listed.
Layer 2
Charter Borough Trust Corporation
A statutory corporation with perpetual succession holds land, rights, and revenues in trust for the Charter objects. It is not a Crown servant. Freehold is retained; long building leases are granted.
Layer 3
High Steward
Fixed-term chief executive and accounting officer. Appoints a Borough Engineer, Master Architect, Comptroller of Public Safety, and Clerk of the Rolls. Judged on infrastructure milestones, land-value preservation, solvency, and civic satisfaction — then rotated or removed.
Layer 4
Court of Assistants
Four seats from long-term capital, three from the commercial franchise, three from the residential franchise, plus non-voting neighbouring-authority liaison. Appoints the Steward, sets the levy, ratifies the Pattern Book.
Layer 5
Civic Jury and liquid voice
A stratified sortition panel — urban and rural, overlapping 6–12 month terms — decides the envelope: Pattern Book amendments of principle, major siting, reserved-stock cuts, amenity closures, levy redesign. A non-voting assessor sits with it to cost alternatives. Residents vote directly or delegate, revocably. Nearby voices weigh more on local siting.
Layer 6
Amenity Trust
A Guiting-style foundation takes a defined stock of dwellings off the open sales market, prioritises local workers and young households, pegs rents to local wages, and recycles estate or commercial surplus into school, hall, fields, and shops.
The two dockets
Sortition and professional office are not rival churches. They are two clocks. Fold them together and you either capture the borough or let it make unworkable decisions. The test: if this panel is wrong, who pays, and can they tell within a year?
Officers apply the envelope
Fourteen-day Certificates of Conformance, levy accounts, service counts, works orders. Named officer, published KPI, removable. A Jury that stays a conforming Certificate is a planning committee.
The Tribunal enforces both
Specific performance, levy abatement, “name the clause.” It cannot invent a new Pattern Book. A late aesthetic preference is not a notice of non-conformance.
Counsel to the Jury does not vote
A professional assessor costs each Forced Construction package, says when it misses the envelope, and writes the reasons. The Jury still decides. The assessor stops a shrug becoming policy.
Locked clauses — Crown reservation, Forced Construction, and the judicial-review carve-out — are not Jury questions. They yield to statute or revocation. Written into Covenant Article 9.
Standing rules
Subsidiarity
Decisions are taken at the smallest level capable of effective action. The borough does the work a borough can do. The centre keeps only what must be common.
Forced Construction
Pure negation is prohibited. An objection to a Pattern Book plot, a levy line, or a siting proposal must carry a specific, feasible alternative that still meets the published envelope.
Skin in the game
Capital that stays, employers who hire locally, and covenant-holders who live there all have a vote. Power that cannot be hurt by failure is not invited to govern.
Temporary office
Stewards, jurors, and Assistants hold time-limited mandates. Trust audits on the borough platform: falling below a published threshold triggers review, rotation, or an improvement plan.
Via negativa
Improvement is first subtraction. Automatic sunsets on borough regulations. One in, two out. Chesterton’s Fence before a working rule is pulled down.
Public by default
Deliberations, awards of the Arbitral Tribunal, levy calculations, and delivery KPIs are published. Capture hides in unread procedure; this design refuses unread procedure.
What this is not
- Not a secession. The Crown’s sovereignty and the criminal law remain intact.
- Not a company town. Residents hold a franchise and a covenant with remedies.
- Not a consultative forum. Juries decide the envelope; officers apply it; both can be removed.
- Not a lawyers’ republic. The Tribunal names clauses. It does not rewrite the Book.
- Not a national overnight replacement. It is an opt-in pilot that neighbouring authorities are paid to tolerate, then copy if it works.
Read the Civic Covenant, the Pattern Book, the enabling Act, and the NCG Charter.