How assembly members have been selected

Closes 31 Dec 2021

Opened 22 Dec 2020

Contact

consultation@bristol.gov.uk

Overview

We recruited 60 assembly members. These members reflected Bristol’s local diversity in terms of age, sex, disability, ethnicity, geography, deprivation, and employment.

Assembly members were provided with everything they need to fully participate in the online assembly process. 

How members have been selected

We worked with the Sortition Foundation to design the stratified, random selection recruitment process. Sortition is an independent, not-for-profit organisation.

Invitation to participate

The Sortition Foundation randomly selected 12,000 Bristol addresses from the Royal Mail’s address database. 

In late November 2020 these households received invitations explaining the citizens’ assembly and asking people to register their interest.   

A high number of responses were received. Nearly 700 people applied to join the assembly.

What is sortition?

Sortition (also known as selection by lottery) is the selection of people as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates.

Selecting members from people that registered an interest

We used Bristol census and statistics information to calculate the numbers of people we needed to recruit from different backgrounds in order to create a citizens' assembly that broadly reflects the diversity of the population in the Bristol City Region. 

We used Bristol indices of deprivation 2019 to make sure that assembly members experiencing different levels of deprivation from different neighbourhoods in Bristol were selected.

 

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Areas

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Audiences

  • All residents

Interests

  • Democracy and participation