PRAGMA

Founding document

The Pragma Charter

Pragma is an evidence-led, non-partisan policy institute. It exists to turn the country's hardest and longest-unsolved problems into policy that a government could actually implement - in the interest of the whole public, not a paying few.

Founding draft for discussion - version 0.1, May 2026. This Charter is itself open to challenge and revision under the process it describes.

1. The name

"Pragma" is the ancient Greek word for a thing done - a deed, an act, a practical matter. It is the root of pragmatic and pragmatism: the disposition to judge an idea by what it actually does in the world, rather than by the ideology it flatters.

The name is a statement of method. Pragma takes no prior position on where a good idea should come from - left or right, state or market - only on whether the evidence shows it would work. The word's older sense matters just as much: a pragma is something done, not merely argued. Pragma's product is therefore not commentary but implementation-ready policy - the deed worked out to the point where it can actually be carried out. The test applied to every piece of work is equally plain: does the evidence show this would serve the public as a whole, rather than a class, an industry, a party or a donor? If a proposal serves a narrower interest while dressed as the public good, it does not belong here.

2. Why Pragma exists

Britain does not lack think tanks. It lacks a particular kind of one. Two gaps, in particular, leave the country's hardest problems unsolved.

The due-diligence gap. Government is consumed by events. Ministers and officials spend their days responding to the crisis in front of them - the headline, the emergency, the next fiscal event - and have little room for the slow, demanding, upfront work a complex problem requires before it can be solved well. So government too often reaches for what is quick: a short-term sticking plaster that is ill-conceived or merely temporary, or a deferral of the hard part to a thinly-scrutinised statutory instrument, kicking the problem down the road for a successor to inherit - without the debate, scrutiny and compromise a durable solution needs. The electoral cycle compounds this: the payoff from fixing a structural problem usually arrives well beyond the next election, so the rational incentive is to manage problems rather than solve them. The result is a country full of well-known, long-diagnosed problems on which the prerequisite due diligence has never been done.

The capture gap. A policy vacuum never stays empty. When government lacks the capacity, the time or the conviction to work a problem out for itself, the gap is filled by whoever can afford to fill it. A large share of the policy thinking that reaches government is produced or funded by interests with a direct stake in the conclusions; several of the most influential policy organisations in the UK decline to disclose who funds them, and independent transparency assessments have rated a number of them poorly for years. This is not a feature of one side of politics - opaque and interested funding exists across the spectrum. The effect is corrosive: the menu of options taken seriously is quietly shaped by who can afford to put options on the table, and a government short of its own ideas drifts, almost by default, toward implementing the agenda of its best-resourced suitors. Taken far enough, that is how an elected government becomes a shadow implementer of the highest bidder's bidding - and how a democracy slides, step by quiet step, toward a kind of plutocracy: policy shaped by private wealth rather than by the public interest. A think tank that is independent, evidenced and transparent is one antidote to that drift.

Pragma exists to close both gaps - and, in closing them, to reach the vacuum first. It provides independent capacity to do the prerequisite due diligence on important policy areas - the deep, patient work government has no room for - and to develop the result into shovel-ready plans that a government can pick up and act on quickly. The aim is blunt: to ensure that when a government reaches for a worked-out answer, a rigorous, evidenced, public-interest answer is already on the table - so that it is the public interest, and not the highest bidder, that sets the terms. Pragma does this working only for the public, disclosing everything about how it is funded and how it reasons, and to a deliberately longer horizon than the electoral cycle - so that its plans deliver tangible improvement in the near term while securing strategic benefit for the long term.

3. Mission

Pragma's mission is to identify the problems that most damage life in the UK and that markets and private capital will not resolve on their own; to design policies that address them fairly and effectively; and to develop those policies into implementation-ready plans that a competent government could act on without delay - designed to deliver tangible improvement in the near term and strategic benefit well beyond the electoral cycle, developed openly, with the evidence shown, and with the public able to scrutinise, propose and judge.

4. Founding principles

These eight principles govern everything Pragma publishes. They are binding on staff, contributors and trustees alike.

1. Evidence before ideology. We start from the problem and the evidence, not from a prior conclusion. Where the evidence is weak or contested, we say so plainly rather than papering over it.

2. Non-partisan by construction. Non-partisanship is not a promise of good intentions; it is built into the method. Every proposal is stress-tested from several political perspectives before publication, and we publish where those perspectives agree and where they do not. Pragma favours no party and seeks the approval of none.

3. The common good is the test. The measure of a policy is whether it improves life for the public as a whole, with particular attention to those least able to protect their own interests - not whether it rewards a sponsor, a sector or a constituency.

4. A policy is not finished until it can be implemented. An idea is not a policy. A policy is not ready until someone can name the legislation, the delivery body, the funding source, the first hundred days, the measures of success and the conditions under which it would be stopped. Pragma's deliverable is implementation-ready work.

5. Radical transparency. We publish our funding, our methods, our reasoning, our evidence grades, our uncertainties and our revisions. Anyone should be able to audit how we reached a conclusion and disagree with us using our own working.

6. Independence - a firewall between funding and findings. No funder may shape, see in advance, or approve a conclusion. The rules that guarantee this are set out in section 7 and are not discretionary.

7. Openness to challenge. We invite disagreement and we publish it. Every piece of work names an author and a reviewer who tried to break it. Being shown wrong, in public, by better evidence is a success of the method, not a failure.

8. The public are participants, not subjects. Policy is done with the public, not merely to them. The long-term design of Pragma lets people nominate problems, contribute evidence and local knowledge, challenge drafts, and vote on the proposals they support.

5. What Pragma does

Pragma produces three things, in sequence:

  • Problem diagnoses - rigorous, evidenced accounts of a specific public problem: its scale, its causes, why markets will not fix it, why past attempts failed, and who bears the cost.
  • Policy outlines - the direction, mechanism and key design choices of a possible solution, honest about what still needs to be resolved.
  • Implementation-ready policy products - the full artefact set for a worked policy: a white paper, an implementation and delivery plan, a costing, a risk-and-safeguards assessment and a communications plan, developed to the standard a government department could pick up and act on.

The National Employment Service in this project - Problem Register entry 12 - is the first worked example of the third category: a registered problem developed into a full policy product. It was drafted before the Method existed and is being brought up to its standard.

6. What Pragma does not do

Pragma does not campaign for any political party or candidate. It does not accept commissioned research in which a funder may shape, approve or veto the conclusion. It does not lobby in private; all of its advocacy is public and on the record. It does not present judgement as fact, or claim more certainty than its evidence supports. And it does not pretend that questions of value - which are legitimately matters for democratic choice - can be settled by evidence alone; it maps such questions honestly and leaves the choosing to the public and their representatives.

7. Funding and independence

An institute that criticises opaque, interested funding must hold itself to a far higher standard than the organisations it is a counterpoint to. The following commitments are binding and are not subject to the discretion of staff or trustees.

  • Full disclosure. Every person or organisation giving £1,000 or more in a financial year is named publicly, with the amount disclosed in bands. Smaller public donations are reported in aggregate.
  • No dominant funder. No single donor may provide more than 10% of annual income, so that no funder can hold the institute hostage by threatening withdrawal.
  • No anonymous money. Anonymous donations are refused and returned. Funding routed to disguise its origin is refused.
  • Topic, never outcome. Pragma may accept funding earmarked for a problem area. It will never accept funding earmarked for a conclusion. Funders do not see, shape or approve findings before publication.
  • A standing firewall. Funders have no access to drafts, no seat in the room where findings are decided, and no advance sight of conclusions.
  • An annual transparency report. Each year Pragma publishes its income, all named funders, every contributor's declared interests, and every case in which a funding offer was declined, with the reason.
  • Independent assessment. Pragma submits to independent funding-transparency assessment and publishes the result in full, whatever it is.
  • Declared interests. Everyone who works on or reviews a piece of Pragma output declares relevant financial and political interests, which are published alongside the work. A relevant interest in a live piece of work requires recusal.

8. Governance

Pragma's structure is designed so that no individual, funder or faction can determine what it concludes.

  • A Board of Trustees holds legal and financial responsibility and appoints senior staff. It does not, and constitutionally cannot, direct findings.
  • An independent Evidence and Methodology Panel guards the method. It reviews whether published work genuinely followed the methodology, can require corrections or retractions, and approves changes to the method itself. Members serve fixed terms, declare their interests, and are chosen for methodological expertise across a range of disciplines and political perspectives.
  • A network of contributors and fellows - researchers, practitioners, former officials, frontline workers and members of the public - carries out and challenges the work.
  • The public deliberation layer (section 10) gives the public a formal role in nominating, scrutinising and judging proposals.

Conflict-of-interest rules apply to trustees, staff and contributors equally, and are published.

9. How Pragma works

Pragma works to a single, public method, set out in full in the companion document The Pragma Method. In summary: a candidate problem must pass four gateway tests before it can enter the Problem Register - it must be material, it must be one that markets and private capital will not resolve alone, it must be tractable to a credible government lever, and it must be genuinely persistent or neglected. A registered problem is then diagnosed, policy options are generated openly, a design is chosen and fully specified, an implementation-ready product is drafted, and the whole thing is adversarially reviewed from several political perspectives. Only then is it published for public deliberation. The method itself is versioned and open to challenge.

10. The public, and the link with auto-wonk

Pragma's long-term aim is that the public are not an audience for its work but a participant in it - able to nominate the problems that matter to them, contribute evidence and local knowledge, challenge proposals in draft, and vote on the proposals they support, giving a live and transparent picture of where public support actually sits.

This connects directly to a sister project, auto-wonk - a civic policy-intelligence platform that monitors what government is actually doing: ingesting bills, debates, votes, consultations and public-inquiry recommendations, and analysing them non-partisanly. The two projects form a single civic loop. auto-wonk holds government to account for what it does and tracks which recommendations are never acted on; Pragma supplies, in the same open and non-partisan spirit, well-developed proposals for what could be done instead. auto-wonk's public deliberation and response features are the natural channel through which Pragma's proposals are put to the public to scrutinise, support or reject - and auto-wonk's record of unimplemented inquiry and committee recommendations is itself one of the richest sources of candidate problems for the Register.

11. Status, and how to contribute

This Charter is a founding draft. Pragma does not yet exist as a constituted body; this document and its companions are the opening move in building it, and they are published in the same spirit they ask of government - early, in the open, and ready to be improved.

There are four ways to contribute from the outset:

  • Nominate a problem for the Register - particularly one you have direct experience of.
  • Contribute evidence, data or lived experience to a diagnosis already underway.
  • Join as a contributor or reviewer - to research, to draft, or to red-team and try to break proposals.
  • Challenge the method itself. The Pragma Method is a draft; a better method is a welcome contribution.

Pragma succeeds only if it is trusted, and it will be trusted only if it earns it - by being right more often than not, by being honest when it is not, and by showing its working every time.