Citizens’ Assemblies, small groups randomly selected to reflect the wider population, are used by public bodies to inform major decisions. That raises a governance question: can a representative group replace the open route that everyone affected may be entitled to expect, and that the law may require?
What is a Citizens’ Assembly designed to do?
Councils, NHS bodies and national government have all turned to Citizens’ Assemblies to examine subjects ranging from social care to local transport. A Citizens’ Assembly brings together a small group of people, usually selected at random and then narrowed through stratified sampling, a selection method that fills quotas for age, location and other characteristics, to reflect the broad make-up of a wider population.
Participants receive briefings, question expert witnesses, deliberate together and produce collective recommendations. Involve, the UK’s specialist public participation charity, sets out the model in detail: assemblies work best on complex questions involving genuine trade-offs, where decision makers commit in advance to explaining how they will respond to whatever the group concludes.
That design is the assembly’s strength. It gives people who would not normally take part in public consultation the time, information and structured discussion needed to reach a considered view. It is not designed to give every person affected by a proposal a direct opportunity to have their say. Those are two different things, and the difference matters more than it first appears.
Why is representing the population not the same as representing everyone affected?
A group selected to reflect the demographics of a wider population, its age profile, geography and socioeconomic mix, is not automatically the same as a group that includes everyone with a direct stake in a proposal. Academic research on this point is blunt.
Spada and Peixoto’s 2025 analysis identifies small sample sizes, bias in the lists used to recruit participants, and low acceptance rates among those invited, as structural limits on how far an assembly’s conclusions can be said to speak for anyone beyond its own members.
Research published in the Journal of Deliberative Democracy reaches a similar conclusion. Random selection solves the problem of consultations that attract only the already engaged, but it does not guarantee that people with a specific interest in a decision are present in the room.
The Cabinet Office’s consultation principles make the same point from a practitioner’s angle. Public bodies are expected to identify the full range of people, businesses and voluntary organisations a policy will affect, not simply assemble a group that looks like the population on paper.
A resident who depends on a service daily, a business whose operation relies on it, or a person whose disability rules out the alternatives on offer, may or may not end up inside a randomly selected room. That is not a flaw in the method. It is a limit on what the method was ever designed to do.
Does holding an assembly satisfy a public body’s legal duty to consult?
Where a public body is under a statutory or common law duty to consult, the answer depends on what that duty requires, not on whether an assembly has taken place.
The Gunning principles, the established legal test for fair public consultation in the UK, require that consultation happens while proposals are still at a formative stage, that consultees receive enough information to respond intelligently, that they are given adequate time to respond, and that the decision maker conscientiously considers what comes back.
The House of Commons Library’s briefing on government consultations sets out how these principles apply in practice, and the circumstances in which a public body risks judicial review, the courts checking whether a public body acted lawfully, if it gets them wrong.
An assembly can meet some of these tests. It can take place early, provide detailed information and allow time for deliberation. What it cannot do automatically is satisfy a duty that names a wider or specifically defined group of consultees.
NHS England’s statutory guidance on working with people and communities makes this explicit for the health sector. The Gunning principles remain informative even where a different form of engagement is used, but they do not transfer their legal weight onto a process that was never designed to reach the people the duty specifies.
How should a Citizens’ Assembly and an open consultation work together?
None of this makes Citizens’ Assemblies the wrong tool. Conventional consultation has its own well-documented weaknesses, responses skewed towards people with strong views or the resources to organise them, and complex questions reduced to a questionnaire. Assemblies were built, in part, to address exactly that.
The UCL Constitution Unit’s Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK shows what the method can achieve when properly resourced: 67 people examining a genuinely difficult question over six weekends, drawn from 20,000 invitations sent to randomly selected addresses.
The point is not to choose between deliberation and participation. It is to use each for what it does well. The Centre for Governance and Scrutiny’s briefing on citizens’ assemblies and neighbourhood governance makes the same case: an assembly can sit alongside an open consultation and targeted engagement with specific groups, each contributing a different kind of evidence to the same decision.
A public body that replaces its open route with an assembly has not necessarily acted unlawfully, but it has narrowed the evidence available to it, and it should be able to explain why that was the right choice for this decision.
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