Lancaster District People's Jury | The Constitution Unit Blog

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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Citizens’ assemblies are now being widely used in the UK and elsewhere to promote thoughtful policy discussion. But do they actually work in terms of delivering substantive policy change? In this post, Robert Liao addresses that question by looking at local citizens’ assemblies in the UK. He finds that the record is overwhelmingly positive: councils that have invested in running an assembly have generally followed through with action.

The past 18 months have seen a wave of citizens’ assemblies in the UK and beyond. At the national level, there have been assemblies on climate change in the UK, Scotland, and France, on constitutional issues in Scotland and Germany, and on gender equality in Ireland. This post focuses on the numerous assemblies convened by local authorities. Citizens’ assemblies are widely lauded for bringing together representative samples of the population to learn about and produce recommendations on difficult policy questions. As shown by the Constitution Unit’s 2017 Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit, the deliberative conversations that they engender point to a better way of doing democratic conversation. But do they have a real impact beyond the people in the room? In particular, do elected officials really listen to them, and can they bring about substantive political change?

The table below summarises evidence from local citizens’ assemblies in the UK. By trawling through assembly and council websites and reports, alongside press releases, and news articles, I have identified 13 citizens’ assemblies convened by local authorities in the UK since the beginning of 2019 which have completed their work and published reports. Three of these – in Cambridge, Dudley, and Romsey – were supported by the UK government’s Innovation in Democracy programme, designed to enable assembly pilots (the IIDP’s work was summarised on the Unit blog, here). In others, local authorities acted independently. Reflecting perhaps campaigning for citizens’ assemblies by Extinction Rebellion, seven of the 13 assemblies focused on climate change, and another two on the related topic of air quality. Two looked at urban regeneration, one at hate crime, and one at social care provision. Each one has presented a report containing policy recommendations to its sponsoring council.

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