The people most affected by COVID-19 should now be fully involved in the inquiry

Posted on September 22, 2022 by The Constitution Unit

The public inquiry into COVID-19 published its terms of reference earlier this summer, with its first ‘promise’ being that ‘People who have suffered during the pandemic will be at the heart of the inquiry’s work’. Simon Burall, Senior Associate at Involve, asks what this really means in practice, and suggests three questions we should ask ourselves to determine whether this promise is kept.

We have been locked down at least twice (and more depending on where you live in the country), schools have been closed, businesses lost and household budgets squeezed. To date, there have been over 200,000 deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate. Nobody has remained untouched by the pandemic.

The UK COVID-19 Public Inquiry has been set-up to explore the impact of the pandemic, to examine the UK’s response, and to learn lessons for the future. Given the widespread impact of the pandemic, the Chair of the Inquiry, Baroness (Heather) Hallett is absolutely right to want to put the public at the heart of its work. It should be celebrated that this is the first of seven ‘promises’ that the inquiry has published. However, this ambition – and the inquiry in general – comes with risks. If this ambition is not met, and the public deem the inquiry to have failed to pass fair judgement, it could further undermine existing low levels of public trust in our politics.

So, this blogpost lays out three questions we will be asking to judge the extent to which the inquiry is keeping this promise, as it progresses in the months to come.

Are the public part of passing judgement and proposing plans for the future, or just witnesses?

The inquiry has been formally constituted and has a legal status as laid out in the 2005 Inquiries Act. The act lays out the statutory framework for the appointment of the Chair, how it should take evidence and produce its report. This will obviously, and rightly, restrict the ways in which the public can be involved, but there is much more the inquiry could do beyond publishing standard consultation questions, inviting a tiny number of members of the public as witnesses and meeting with specific groups which were particularly affected.

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Launching the Report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK

Posted on April 7, 2022 by The Constitution Unit

Today the Unit publishes the Report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK. Set up by the Unit last year, the Assembly offers unparalleled insights into public perceptions of how the UK’s democracy is working and should work. In this post, the project’s Research Assistant, James Cleaver, summarises the Assembly’s recommendations.

The Report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK contains the conclusions of the first UK-wide citizens’ assembly to discuss the topic of democracy. Many of these conclusions speak directly to major ongoing political debates: around standards in public life, the balance between key democratic institutions, and the role of the public.

The Assembly

The Assembly was convened to answer the overarching question of ‘How should democracy in the UK work?’. It was conducted by the Constitution Unit in partnership with Involve, the UK’s leading public participation charity. Over six online weekends between September and December last year, Assembly members focused on three key areas of democracy: the relationship between government and parliament; the roles of the public; and ways of upholding rules and standards.

Having deliberated about these topics, members produced eight overarching resolutions and 51 specific recommendations, the latter designed to achieve the ambitions of the resolutions. Looking across these conclusions, three key themes emerge.

First, members expect high standards from those in public life, and they want independent regulators to be able to enforce this. Second, they oppose unduly concentrated power, calling for parliament, the courts and other constitutional checks to play more prominent roles. Third, members want better mechanisms for the public’s voice to be heard, both through improvements to the representative system, and through better use of petitions, referendums and deliberative processes.

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Local citizens’ assemblies in the UK: a second report card

Posted on March 25, 2022 by The Constitution Unit

Posts on this blog over the past few years have tracked a wave of local citizens’ assemblies convened by councils keen to explore a range of issues. Last year, we published an ‘early report card’ examining the impact these assemblies were having – whether councils were listening to them and acting on their recommendations. A year on, it is time to take a fresh look. Lauren Brown here updates the report card to the end of 2021.

A wave of local citizens’ assemblies began in the summer of 2019 in the UK, with topics discussed ranging from climate change to air quality in local boroughs. Despite COVID-19 and the need to shift such assemblies online, the interest in using deliberative processes has continued. Often utilised to help resolve politically tricky issues, citizens’ assemblies are widely celebrated for how they allow representative samples of the population to consider issues deeply before making recommendations.

In the UK, by the end of 2021, there had been 23 citizens’ assemblies, with seven held in the last year alone. These have primarily focused on issues of climate change, though some have also considered COVID-19 recovery and neighbourhood design. Moreover, the London borough of Newham has become the first UK council to create a permanent citizens’ assembly, thereby institutionalising public deliberation within the UK at a local level. The wave of local citizens’ assemblies in the UK therefore shows no real sign of letting up.

Still, as Robert Liao noted last year, the devil is in the detail – whilst it is clear that citizens’ assemblies continue to be popular for addressing local issues, it is less evident whether the recommendations they produce are consistently being followed up on. With the Unit’s own Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK – which will report in full next month – stressing that people want their ‘elected representatives to do better’, it thus remains key to ask whether citizens’ assemblies lead to significant change, and whether their recommendations are being implemented as well as just listened to.

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Implementing the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK

Posted on October 22, 2021 by The Constitution Unit

The Constitution Unit is currently running a Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK as part of its Democracy in the UK after Brexit project. As the Assembly nears the halfway point in its deliberations, the project’s Research Assistant, James Cleaver, describes the principles that have shaped its design.

The first two weekends of the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK – which met online on 18–19 September and 9–10 October – have concluded successfully. These initial weekends focused on introducing assembly members to the Assembly process, to the principles of democracy and to the operation of democracy in the UK today. This weekend it will start to focus in on more concrete institutional questions. So now is an appropriate time to review how the Assembly has been designed and how it is going so far.

Recruiting members

As the project lead, Unit Deputy Director Alan Renwick, outlined in a previous post, we have recruited the Assembly’s 74 or so members to be representative of the UK population. That matters for two main reasons.

First, diversity of membership means that individuals from all walks of life across all parts of the UK are involved in the discussions. Such a broad range of personal perspectives should lead to more considered and holistic conclusions. Second, representativeness is essential to the legitimacy of the Assembly’s conclusions. The Assembly offers insight into what the country as a whole might think if all citizens could participate in this process.

Bringing together a representative sample of the UK population has not been without its challenges – we saw an unusually high number of individuals withdraw from the process between initial recruitment and the opening weekends. This likely reflects in part the circumstances of this moment in time: as society reopens following months of restrictions, many may find the prospect of spending six weekends on Zoom unappealing. It may also be an inherent feature of running an assembly online: members do not have to plan for a weekend away from home, so the exigencies of their personal lives may be more likely to intervene. In addition, this Assembly is not connected to an official implementing authority, such as government.

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Launching the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK

Posted on September 17, 2021 by The Constitution Unit

The Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK – part of the Unit’s current research project examining attitudes to democracy in the UK – will meet for the first time this weekend. The project’s lead, Alan Renwick, here answers five key questions about what the Assembly will do, how it will operate, and why it deserves attention.

This weekend, 75 members of the public, from all walks of life and across the UK, will gather online to begin examining the question ‘How should the UK’s democracy work?’. This Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK is part of the Constitution Unit’s wider research project Democracy in the UK after Brexit, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) through its Governance after Brexit programme.

1. What will the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK look at?

The assembly will focus on how people think democracy in the UK should work. What principles do assembly members think the democratic system should uphold in its design and operation? How do they think power within the system should be distributed – in particular, what roles do they think should be played by core parts of the system, including parliament, government, courts, and members of the public? And what behaviours do they expect from politicians and their fellow citizens?

A citizens’ assembly is designed to enable informed discussion, so we cannot cover everything – we have had to make hard choices. We can’t get into the detail of institutions such as the voting system or House of Lords. Nor will we address the territorial dimension of democracy – how power should be distributed between UK-wide and devolved levels, or what powers local councils should have. These matters would require multiple assemblies meeting across the country.

Nevertheless, the discussions and recommendations will be as relevant in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland as at UK level. The question of how democracy is best configured and practised applies equally in all these settings.

2. Why do these questions need attention?

Democracy works best when public confidence in its functioning is high. Yet confidence in the operation of the democratic system in the UK (as in many other long-established democracies) is low. Various surveys – including the British Social Attitudes survey and the Hansard Society’s Audit of Political Engagement – have mapped this problem over many years. But there has been little attempt to dig deeper into people’s thinking. The project will help fill that gap.

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