Copeland People's Panel on Climate Change: recruitment process

The Copeland People’s Panel on Climate Change follows best practice guidelines set by previous Citizens’ Juries and Citizens’ Assemblies.

The recruitment process for the People’s Panel aims to recruit a mini version of Copeland’s population and was agreed by the project Oversight Panel. The Oversight Panel agreed that the profile of the 30 people selected should intentionally reflect local diversity in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, geography, levels of deprivation and attitude to climate change.

With the agreement of the Oversight Panel, Shared Future worked with the Sortition Foundation to design the recruitment process. The Sortition Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organisation that promotes the use of stratified, random selection in decision-making.

Various sources were used to obtain the representative data, including Copeland District Equality Profile (2019) for age, gender and ethnicity, IoD 2019 for indices of deprivation and BEIS Public Attitudes Tracker Wave 35 (May 2021) for attitudes to climate change,

In June, 6,000 households across Copeland received a recruitment letter explaining the People’s Panel and inviting those who are interested to either complete a very simple online form or use a freephone number to register their interest.

The Sortition Foundation randomly selected the addresses from the Royal Mail’s address database. The Sortition Foundation then selected from the long list of those who registered a group of 30 that reflect the local population in terms of  gender, age, ethnicity, geography, levels of deprivation and attitude to climate change.