GEOFF Hoon, leader of the House of Commons, bravely opens up the debate about how to encourage people to vote by saying attendance at a polling station should be compulsory on election day.

He even suggests that if you vote, you might get a small reduction in your council tax bill.

All very interesting. And Mr Hoon is right to say that continuing low turn-outs will threaten our democracy.

So here are a few more ideas to open out the debate.

For a start, one of the reasons people don't vote is because they've lost faith in politicians. Now, it would help if people were less prone to being cynical about politicians. But it would be an even bigger help if politicians engaged more fully with the voters.

For example, on our doorstep, a major secondary school is threatened with closure. The debate in the village of Hurworth has been heated, to say the least, but a month on, the local MP remains silent.

This is because he is Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the president of the European Union and the chairman of the G8 group of the world's richest nations. For wholly understandable reasons - poverty in Africa, EU treaty and budget crises, war in Iraq, Olympic bids to be won - his mind has been elsewhere rather than on an embryonic local issue.

But to the people of Hurworth, living in a 24-hour electronic mass communications age and facing a major life upheaval, that is little consolation as they feel left out of the political system.

Secondly - and similarly - if we're honest, there was little point in voting in Sedgefield at the last election - or in Richmond across the Tees, for that matter. The results were foregone conclusions so there was no incentive for the uncommitted to vote for or against either Mr Blair (majority: 18,457) or William Hague (majority: 17,807).

Would Mr Hoon compel apathetic people to cast votes that are effectively meaningless? Wouldn't that turn them off even more?

Wouldn't it be better to create a system whereby every vote had a real meaning and a real relevance to those about to cast them?