DEMOCRACY HOPE DIGNITY FREEDOM SPIRIT JUSTICE SUSTAINABILITY OPENNESS SOUL POWER PEOPLE HUMANITY

Social Impact Statement (Ref: p1201)

Environmental Impact Statements were unknown thirty years ago. Now nobody thinks such a thing is in any way unusual. Do the same with a Social Impact Statment. Use SISs among other things to help prevent corporations from being able to misbehave in the first place, without having to involve the creation of international bodies to crack the whip. International bodies, for all the reasons I go into elsewhere, are bodies which themselves are vulnerable to 'corruption'. The SIS also allows local 'flavouring' of what people would like to allow or disallow, using local knowledge to judge, for example, the ethos of a company, by local standards not those of another country or someone in a city not a rural area. This is following the principle of keeping power at the lowest level possible.

The purpose of the Social Impact Statement is to provide a means to measure the true effects of something like a company closing a plant or office, opening a big installation or changing from day to 24 hour working. It is really an extension of the environmental impact statement as the environment is everything not just flora, fauna and landscape. The SIS needs to take into account the views of all affected and all the impacts. Both the main parties to the SIS must be expected to counter the views of the other whenever appropriate in order to balance out bias. The SIS should be constructed from four parts :

The contribution from the party putting forward a plan. This must be the plan in detail, its justification and a statement of its impacts
The contribution from the local authority's SIS body giving its assessment of the impacts
The contribution from the People, in other words, anybody's comments
The judgement on the proposal's merits from an outside agency experienced in these enquiries

All four parts of this enquiry will be combined into one document which must remain as one entity, permanently. It must be present in its entirety, permanently, on the Web.

(Ref: p1202)

The SIS will address the following issues :

How many people will lose or gain jobs
The distribution of these people's homes
The ages, health, job prospects, wealth, education and mobility of these people
The welfare of all the children of these people
The effects on local schools
The effects on local health facilities
The effects on local infrastructure and local public transport
The effects on local tax revenues
The effects on local housing estates and districts
The effects on local traders and businesses
The effects on the extent of the influence of the proposal, both on employees and customers and others who may be affected
The effects on the natural environment locally
The effects on the natural environment regionally
The effects on the natural environment globally
The effects on the regional community
The effects on the regional economy

In the event that a company or plant or installation is moving into an area from somewhere else, anywhere in the world, the SIS will be compiled. The SIS is about the effect of change on People not just our people and if 'we' are to gain something then we must measure whether and how much 'other people' are going to lose. Part of the purpose of the SIS is to make it plain that economies of scale for enterprises have costs as well as benefits and these costs are usually paid by the People not the enterprise. If this was not the case then why is the enterprise making these changes in the first place?

QUESTIONS (Ref: p1299) (Contact us)

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Democracy for a new millennium

Social Impact Statement (Ref: p1201)