This November, 500 people, selected at random to reflect the full diversity of the UK population, will come together to consider some of the biggest long-term choices facing the country.

The National Strategy Project announced plans for UK in One Room this weekend at the FT Weekend Festival, where Matthew joined Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s 1st Minister for Digital Affairs at the FT Festival, for a discussion entitled “How Technology Can Help Revive Democracy”.

We are delighted that Audrey is an advisor to the NSP and it was fascinating to hear more about her experience of using technology and deliberation to bring people with different starting points together and find areas of common ground (we loved the notion of ‘bridging bonuses’).

Matthew then shared more about the NSP and the exciting news of the launch of “UK in One Room”. This is the first major step in building something the UK has never had – a reliable way to establish where informed public judgement lies on major long-term choices, then turning that into shared direction, and then acting on it over time.

Working with Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab and YouGov, we will convene a 1.5-day process to explore & deliberate four connected areas in which long-term pressures are already forcing choices, such as:

1. Population, work and the social settlement: How should a longer-lived country share work, care, contribution and migration?
2. Growth, investment and AI: What are we prepared to invest, build and change to become more productive?
3. Energy, infrastructure and ownership: What energy system should the UK build, who should own and operate it, and what trade-offs are we prepared to make?
4. Security and strategic resilience: How much autonomy can and should the UK seek in a world of increasingly powerful blocs?

Critical to the whole approach is that the purpose is not to tell people what the answers should be, but rather to understand how people judge the choices when they have reliable information, hear different perspectives and have time to work through the consequences.

‘UK in One Room’ is the beginning, not the end. From there, we will open the conversation much more widely across the country, combining online small-group deliberation, public engagement and new technology to make serious national dialogue possible at unprecedented scale.

An enthusiastic and energised Q&A followed, demonstrating the opportunity for the NSP, but also highlighting some of the challenges that such a pioneering challenge will face. Matthew and Audrey both talked candidly about the challenges of giving people meaningful agency in difficult national decisions, while strengthening the capability needed to act on them, emphasising the huge potential and reasons for optimism. As Matthew ended it:

“This is not about the Civil Service doing stuff differnerly. This is about everyone doing stuff differently.

It is a challenge to the media, to politicians, to business, to charities – pretty much every sector in this country“

We can’t do this alone. This will be a complete national effort. ‘UK in One Room’ is happening this November. Now we need the country around it. We are looking for partners who can help us scale to reach people across the UK, organisations that can contribute expertise and capability, media and cultural partners who can help make this a genuine national moment – and funders who can help us take the next step. Get in touch here

And you can watch the whole session here