Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, when the Government plans to introduce its Innovation in Democracy pilots; and what steps he is taking to ensure that pilots relating to (a) citizens’ juries and (b) other forms of face-to-face deliberation are representative of the areas in which they take place.

The Innovation in Democracy Programme (IiDP) will involve citizens in decision making at local government level through innovative models of participatory democracy and will be launching in late 2018.

Participating local authorities will be piloting Citizens’ Juries to open up a decision they have to make to citizen deliberation. One of the key elements of a Citizens’ Jury is that they are made up of a random selection of the local population accounting for age, ethnicity, gender and potentially other characteristics. This means that the Jury is truly representative of the demographics of the area in which it takes place. The Local Authorities will be supported in this by a Democracy Support Contractor (to be appointed) who will assist them in designing and implementing a process that works for their context, as well as funding to cover costs.