Assembly Project

(A view of Penzance. No sign of any pirates.)

I’ve discussed in an earlier post about the problem that citizens’ assemblies cost so much money to run, and possible solutions. This is why I was intrigued to find articles about a citizens’ assembly in the southwestern corner of England. It was run for only £1,500. Like Assemble’s recent House of the People, it was run for less than a tenth of what a citizens’ assembly for the area would usually cost. How did they do it?

The articles can be found on Citizens’ Network and openDemocracy. The Penzance Citizens’ Panel was arranged by Cornwall Poverty Forum to address the issue of homelessness. (A citizens’ panel, or a citizens’ jury, are loose terms for a small citizens’ assembly.) It was largely the work of one of their trustees, Gavin Barker, the author of both articles. Most of the costs for a citizens’ assembly stem from hiring the specialist resources of professional organisers like the Sortition Foundation. With the county council declining to support them, Cornwall Poverty Forum ran it with a do-it-yourself approach, cutting out most of the costs.

Gavin selected and ran the assembly with one helper. A local vicar offered them use of a church hall for free. The assembly was advertised through fliers and social media. Residents were promised a £50 stipend for attending. As Gavin explained during my call with him, the stipend helped but not because the panellists cared much for the money. Rather, offering the money showed that the citizens’ panel was a serious project. They had 45 applicants, of whom 15 were chosen for the panel.

Homelessness in a local area is not an issue that I would’ve expected to stir difficult opinions. But it had been divisive. At a previous public meeting, some residents had suggested ferrying local homeless people to the remote countryside, drawing incensed responses from others.

Once again then, we have an example of how the assembly format produces better debates than traditional public meetings. In the end, the citizens’ panel came to a wide agreement on some reasonable recommendations, such as more money to tackle street homeless, expanding the supply of social housing and restricting second home ownership.

Similar to the reports on citizens’ assemblies in other places such as Gdansk, there are clear signs that participants enjoyed the experience and once they came, were eager to return. Gavin recalled expecting many to be absent on a day of stormy weather, yet the full panel turned up again.

Both articles cover many of the key lessons learned from the experience. One is to not be put off if the local council doesn’t want to get involved. Once the citizens’ panel got going, councillors soon proved willing to work with the panel once it started, and a member of the council’s cabinet gave a key presentation.

But perhaps the most important point was that future assemblies should make better use of the applicants who didn’t make the selection. These applicants, 30 out of the 45, were clearly eager to get involved, so perhaps they could have been recruited for promoting the panel and campaigning for its decisions to be enacted. One idea of mine is that they could form an alternative assembly, which would not be as representative as the selected panel but could assist it by acting as a testing ground for ideas. Gavin suggested an informal meeting of the panellists and non-selected applicants. The former will be reminded that they are serving a wider community, and the latter can help connect them to it.

Through talking to Gavin, I found a few more lessons:

• You can run a citizens’ panel in the space of about four months.
• Panellists need a right to privacy. If the citizens’ panel looks likely to have a big impact and its membership become public, it may result in them getting unwanted attention in their private lives, and the process would risk being distorted by lobbying or even bribery. This does raise the question of how to make sure the panel doesn’t feel faceless and distant, which is why I suggest training a few of its members so that they can advocate for the panel and share their experience on it. Again, the non-selected applicants could play a role here in promoting it.
• You may not need many organisers at all. Gavin suggested one alternative to having an official steering committee is to have one or two organisers who record their decisions in an official online log.
• A spreadsheet can do the sampling process. The Penzance selection was done by literally drawing paper out of a hat, with a weighting system to ensure that the panel was representative of some factors like gender. However, there are now freely available tools like Panelot that can do the weighted selections process. Google Forms can collect the data, which can be fed into Google Spreadsheets.
• Councils and governments may not be able to cut these costs. As Gavin pointed out, councils can’t afford to make mistakes, so may need professionals to do the selection and facilitation. But there is no reason why non-government citizens’ assemblies need to, including for the purpose of advising councils. This, of course, would inevitably apply to higher levels of government too.
• It’s still not clear how to turn it into action. Some recommendations of the Penzance citizens’ panel were adopted as policy in a report by the county council, which is not bad going for a council that had at first ignored them.

Let’s address the last point. Citizens’ assemblies are great at making decisions, but whether they’d be enacted remains a roll of the dice. Only some recommendations from the French Citizens Convention on Climate passed into law, while its British counterpart was ignored completely. If we run citizens’ assemblies, how can could we turn them into action?

One is to persuade the council or government to act on them. This is why it is worth trying to build bridges with sceptical councils. It is easier to resort to uncooperative tactics if cooperative ones fail than the other way round.

But what if you can’t? And you probably can’t if you’re trying to be heard by a more distant national government. And this is where I advocate protest action. Gathering in a public square with placards can draw media attention to an issue. But that’s not always enough. If a non-disruptive protest doesn’t work, only non-violent but disruptive protest action can push the authorities to act.

Assemblies are a form of democracy that isn’t fully figured out yet, but the best way to address that is to keep doing experiments like the one in Penzance.