OUR VISION

We imagine a society where collective decisions are made by a permanent, rotating Citizens' Commons. Similar to a Citizens' Assembly, decisions are made through deliberation and consensus building, feeding in diverse inputs generating a collective intelligence, rather than majority voting in line with the party whip of whichever of the two parties is in power. 

Decisions made by the Citizens' Commons will feed into the existing bureaucracy or Civil Service, whose core value is already 'impartiality', to develop and implement resulting policies. In the UK,  there are currently c.600 government departments which “supports the government of the day in developing and implementing its policies, and in delivering public services. Civil servants are accountable to ministers, who in turn are accountable to Parliament” (GOV.UK). We seek to redraw the lines of accountability so the Civil Service is directly accountable to the people. 

Participants in the Citizens' Commons will be selected by lot, or sortition to be representative of the population and their engagement in the Commons will be rewarded every step of the way. Taking part in the Commons will be a civic duty similar to jury service. There will be multiple Citizens' Commons in rotation at any one time across various topics, in parallel, with a different cohort of citizens selected for each. Due to the selection process of sortition ensuring the Citizens' Commons to be representative of the population, unlike competitive election campaigns, this group of real people with lived experiences can replace the current House of Commons made up of career politicians. 

In a typical Citizens' Assembly, there is usually weeks of a learning and education phase around a particular topic in preparation of the main deliberations. Therefore an 'ordinary citizen' who, as part of the Commons will be undertaking such preparations on top of bringing their own life experience to the table, can be seen to contribute more than a typical party minister who spares little time to read a briefing paper, or who may not prepare for the decision-making at all because they are told how to vote by the party whip. A politician may therefore also be voting against their own personal principles - see Labour ministers fired over calling for a Gaza ceasefire, or Conservative ministers resigning over their stance on the Rwanda Bill.

Currently the House of Lords which sits next to the House of Commons within Parliament is supposed to carry out the checks and balancing function, and to an extent they do this well. This can be seen by the various amendments to Bills which go back and forth between the Commons and the Lords such as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. There is a role for people with expertise in the particular area being deliberated to contribute to the decision-making, adding to the collective intelligence being generated by the Citizens' Commons.

As technology is increasingly used to connect and communicate, especially alongside the rise of AI tools, only those with a human-centred design focus will be adopted in the Commons. This is to enhance the experience for participants towards empowerment, as individuals and as part of the collective, so that people feel connected with each other as part of the whole. This will create positive ripple effects for society as participants re-enter their communities feeling heard, included and overall more knowledgeable after engaging in the Commons.