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Bottom-up engagement in Blackpool and Darwen
Like many of the local authorities and voluntary organisations critiqued in the House of Commons Select Committee report Social Cohesion, both Blackburn Council and members of its Local Strategic Partnership were perceived by local people as having failed to create opportunities for different communities to have an equal say in how problems affecting Blackburn should be tackled.
Early in 2004 the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust decided to fund a DIY jury project in Blackburn and Darwen in which the randomly-selected jurors chose the subject of their deliberations, but in which issues of racism and community cohesion were also openly addressed.
A bottom-up approach seemed likely to improve cohesion among local community members by making decision makers genuinely accountable to members of diverse communities on an issue of immense local concern.
It is only rarely, and even then only partially, that institutions with the greatest influence over decisions volunteer to take part in consultation processes where other organisations can act as an effective counter-weight. In Blackburn , the DIY Jury process gave two such organisations - Lancashire Constabulary and Blackburn Council - the opportunity to take part in a process where a JRCT-funded DIY jury had the resources to hold them to account.
The Blackburn DIY jury took concrete steps towards creating a space in which people from a wide variety of backgrounds in the Borough would have an equal part in deciding on a subject on which to hold a jury. The resulting jury included long-term residents, residents from established immigrant communities as well as new migrants. The jurors jointly owned this democratic space and the conclusions that arose from it.
The simultaneous engagement of jurors on two separate areas, one of which they had prioritised (issues of alcohol, illegal drugs and crime), and the other of which was a priority of the funder and local decision-makers (racial justice and community cohesion) , has made significant steps towards creating a process that is both policy-relevant and more democratically legitimate than conventional consultations.
Over the course of the jury hearings, jurors seemed to express a perception that the gap between the policy-makers and local citizens like themselves appeared to be far greater than any differences arising from different ethno-cultural heritage backgrounds among themselves. In an area of major deprivation, the jurors rose to the challenge of moving away from a politics that pitted people from different backgrounds against each other, towards one that valued solidarity between individuals who all saw each other as having rights in common.