King's College London

The conference, Earning Trust: How Can Elected Representatives Engage People Better? was hosted on 22 October by Dr Jeevun Sandher MP – a King’s alumnus – together with the King’s Centre for British Democracy.

Dr Sandher opened the event by warning that widening economic divides and polarising social media were "pulling people apart," making it difficult to strengthen social cohesion.

The event explored practical innovations from the UK and abroad designed to re-engage citizens across three panels. International examples included Belgium's use of permanent, randomly selected citizen assemblies to advise parliament, and Taiwan's ‘Participation Officers Network’, which embeds an engagement culture across government ministries.

In the UK, new approaches include using arts-based methods like legislative theatre to involve marginalised groups, and testing "compact deliberation" to make public input more scalable.

Speakers highlighted deep challenges. Journalist Ros Taylor noted that while transparency had increased, trust had continued to fall, partly because social media had weakened local journalism.

Professor Sarah Birch, from the Department of Political Economy at King's, highlighted an "accountability gap," finding citizens defined ethical behaviour as honesty, while politicians often saw it as just staying within legal limits.

The conference also saw the presentation of the National Strategy Project, an initiative aiming to launch a "mass deliberation at true national scale" to give people "real agency”.