Havering Council has announced plans for the borough’s first citizen plan to launch later in 2026, to make sure residents have more of a say in council decision-making and delivery of services.
The Council will recruit a pool of up to 1,000 participants, which will provide ongoing insight, feedback and lived experience perspectives to inform key themes and policy areas across the Council.
From this wider group, smaller focus groups will be formed to help provide feedback on services and plans.
Recruitment will be through a combination of open public invitations and targeted outreach to ensure balanced representation.
The aim would be to have residents from across the borough that reflects all our communities, including age, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, and geographic distribution.
The Panel will take part in several engagement sessions each year, using a mixture of in-person workshops and online meetings.
Each session will focus on specific policy topics, service areas or emerging issues requiring resident insight.
All activities will be designed to be fully accessible.
This includes providing accessible venues, translated or alternative format materials where required, digital support for those who need help participating online, and ensuring the Panel is inclusive of people across all protected characteristics.
It also offers a structured way to involve residents earlier in shaping policies and decisions, reaching underrepresented groups, and building trust in local democracy.
In addition, this should lead to reduced consultation fatigue, where the council is being more focused on their asks of citizens as well as reaching people who are often not normally heard.
It should also lead to faster responses to emerging issues, strengthening the Council’s evidence base and help shift from reactive consultations toward continuous dialogue with communities, helping embed participation across the Council.
This will then lead to building legitimacy and transparency, and be more cost-effective in the long term by reducing the need for multiple engagement exercises and external research, saving money across the organisation.
The Deputy Leader of Havering Council, Councillor Gillian Ford, said:
"We have listened to residents who want to have more of a say in decision-making and how services are run.
"In our engagement strategy launched in 2024, we said that we will look at launching a Citizen Panel, which will do just that.
"These are used by other local authorities quite effectively and help ensure that residents can get more involved, challenge and help shape what we do.
"We will look at starting recruitment for this panel later in the summer and early autumn."