Citizens’ assemblies are a type of democratic decision-making process used across the world.

A randomly selected group of people are bought together to learn about a topic, discuss with one another, and make recommendations about what should happen and how things should change. The people selected broadly represent the entire community.

Adapting to our changing climate, and achieving net zero by 2040, requires collaboration with everybody across Westminster. This is why we have adopted the method of a citizen’s assembly to bring residents to the heart of decision making around how we can collectively respond to the climate emergency.

50 Westminster residents were selected at random to attend assembly sessions and address the following issues:

• How can we overcome the main barriers to Westminster becoming a net zero city by 2040 together? How do we ensure this is delivered in the fairest way?

Members attended four sessions between June and July 2023 to learn about climate issues, discussed them and made recommendations.

These recommendations were then reported to a meeting of the full council and will inform an updated version of our Climate Emergency Action Plan.

We partnered with Involve and Sortition Foundation to deliver a truly impartial and meaningful assembly for Westminster.

Involve is the UK’s leading public participation charity. It develops, supports and campaigns for new ways to involve people in decisions that affect their lives.

Sortition Foundation is a non-for-profit organisation that specialises in recruiting and selecting people by lottery to take part in these kinds of events, in a way that is broadly representative of the wider populations.

Over 10,000 randomly selected addresses received a postal invitation to register to take part in the assembly. 50 people were then selected by lottery to take part in the event. The lottery process was completed to ensure participants best represented Westminster as a whole. The final assembly members were confirmed at the end of May 2023.

If you didn't receive a postal invitation, you couldn't apply to be an assembly member.

There are lots of other ways to be involved in opportunities across Westminster. Find out more about Our Westminster.

Keep up to date with the Citizens’ Climate Assembly by signing up to the Environment Newsletter.