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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what discussions she has had with Cabinet colleagues on her Department’s deliberative democracy pilot.

The Innovation in Democracy Programme was a £550,000, one-year joint Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (now Department for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities) programme that trialled innovative models of deliberative democracy to involve citizens in local decision making. We supported three local authorities (LAs) to pilot citizens’ assemblies, which enabled the LAs to convene a randomly selected but representative sample of residents to deliberate, reach consensus, and make recommendations about a difficult policy issue that the LA had to make. This led to people having an impact on local policy development and delivery.

The programme ended in March 2020 and work in this field is no longer continuing. We published a publicly-available toolkit for local authorities and other policymakers about how to hold their own citizens' assemblies. Case studies for all three citizens’ assemblies are available on GOV.UK.