Let the people decide

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Martin Wainwright helped to pioneer the Community Fund’s experiment in popular democracy. It should, he argues, be embraced throughout Quangoland

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Getting the people involved in the distribution of ‘their’ lottery’s funds is one of the challenges of this summer, exercising the government’s mind and producing a crop of ideas. Voting on tickets, TV selection of good causes, advisory citizens’ juries; can they create a notion of ownership? Would it be real? And might it staunch the flow of hostile publicity about where Lotto money is spent?

Rather quietly, for the last five years, an experiment in directly involving the public in the spending of millions of lottery pounds has been practised by the Community Fund. Each of the nine regional awards committees (RACs) picks members – usually two out of ten –straight from the electoral roll by random choice; the purest form of democracy as used in the selection of court juries. They then sit in judgement over spending totalling many millions of pounds.

I took part in the early days of this invigorating experiment, sitting on a hot May day in York public library. As teenagers nervously did their last-minute exam revision, I went through the electoral roll, picking out voters whose numbers ended in 38.

That was the previous week’s lottery bonus ball, which we used to select our two ‘by lot’ members of the Yorkshire & Humber RAC, after randomly choosing two councils (York and Barnsley) from the 27 in the region. Even at that stage, reading down the basic sinew of democracy with all its diverse names at diverting addresses, each with an equal say in our government, I felt a deep, egalitarian kick. Yes! These are ‘The People’ the politicians and everyone else talk about. Let’s go get ’em.

The ones which the Community Fund has subsequently gone and got (the pilot scheme in Yorkshire and London went national after praise from two independent audits), have acquitted themselves well. There have been no disasters but lots of issues have arisen: how much training and confidence-building should RAC members (however chosen) have?

How far should random choice be modified by the interviews which ‘by lot’ respondents from the electoral roll – usually up to five per vacancy – go on to face?

This last process particularly interested MPs on the House of Commons select committee on public administration, which took evidence at the end of last year about the experiment for its current inquiry into Public Administration and Patronage. At its best, explained the Law Society’s chief executive Janet Paraskeva (who nursed the scheme into life when she was England director of the Community Fund), the interviews avoided ‘one of us’ bias but brought out candidates with the essential virtues such as confidence (or the ability to develop it) and time. More compelling than Janet, however, were the two ‘by lot’ members of RACs who gave evidence themselves. The highlight for everyone was the moment when Linda Parkinson, a teaching assistant chosen by lot for the West Midlands RAC, accused one of the MPs of being naïve – precisely the criticism most people assume would apply to ‘ordinary’ people let loose among Quangoland’s great and good.

The whole room laughed; but the committee took serious note of the optimistic nature of the experiment, compared with the more desperate nature of many other attempts to find ways of widening quango membership. Janet Paraskeva struck a particular chord when she said: ‘Having run a small quango and having myself been on a health trust, I know that on both those occasions I got there partly on merit, but also, in terms of the trust, because somebody knew whose shoulder to tap on. We were tapping the shoulders of lots of folk and saying, “Have you thought of this?”’ The commissioner for public appointments, Dame Rennie Fritchie, who gave evidence at the beginning and the end of the inquiry, modified her initial scepticism about random choice as a result of this evidence. The MPs are likely to recommend testing the idea more

thoroughly when they publish their Public Appointments and Patronage report, due out in July.

Their interest coincides with the findings of the DCMS’s own Review of Lottery Funding, whose key points from respondents, published in February, included support for extending the ‘by lot’ experiment. The associated survey commissioned from Opinion Leader Research also noted: ‘a call for greater transparency and accountability on the decisions made [by lottery distributors] and a greater degree of public voice and involvement. People suggested, in common to some responses to the consultation paper, that some members of the public should be involved in decision-making panels’.

This confluence of opinion, and the sturdy, self-evident work done by the 26 people so far chosen by lot suggest an idea whose time may have come. Or more accurately, returned.

For this is not a novelty, gimmick or wheeze. It dates back to the Athenian father of democracy Cleisthenes (C5 BC) and is used in countless applications beyond court juries, including the choice of high school places in over-subscribed parts of Lancashire, public housing in Holland and the military draft in the US. Nor is it a cure-all; just one, practical attempt to apply to the lottery Tom Paine’s perception in The Rights of Man: that government should find ways to ‘bring forward, by quiet and regular operation’ the common sense we all share, which in civic terms is so sadly underused.

Martin Wainwright, northern editor of The Guardian, chaired (1995-99) the Community Fund’s Yorkshire and Humberside awards committee which initiated the ‘by lot’ experiment. Contact him on martin.wainwright@guardian.co.uk Read the House of Commons inquiry evidence at www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm2002 03/cmselect/cmpubadm/165-ii/2121201.htm