Addressing the UK Public Trust Crisis: Rethinking Mechanisms for Representation and Accountability in the Constitution of the UK

Public trust in political institutions and actors is at a historic low, continuing on a downward trajectory. The present failure to successfully address the lack of public trust in politics has constitutional implications due to culture, context and constitutions being increasingly accepted as interconnected. This thesis aims to address the public trust deficit in the UK, first by reviewing and contextualising the notion of trust from an interdisciplinary perspective, in the process noting that low levels of trust have significant implications on the political system and constitutional architecture of a state, including public (dis)engagement, appetite for constitutional change and priming the political sphere for rising populism. It is, therefore, timely given contemporary events such as Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic response that have increased the strain on an already ‘unsettled’ constitution, and the pervasive nature of mounting political distrust that constitutional law academics and beyond work towards generating potential solutions. The solutions provided within the course of this thesis are arrived at by virtue of responding to the calls for methodological pluralism, by incorporating methods most regularly seen in other social science disciplines, including empirical data, both quantitative and original qualitative data, comparative approaches, doctrine, and of course, theoretical analysis. In doing so, the conclusions formed within the thesis is that public (dis)trust arises in two core forms in the United Kingdom: concerns regarding perceived insufficient representation and grievances to do with the belief that political institutions and actors lack accountability for their actions. In order to work towards addressing these grievances, two measures are put forward. In response to the perceived lack of representation, the institutionalisation of Citizens’ Assemblies in the UK as a democratic innovation is suggested. Such an approach gains its legitimacy from the success of their implementation in other jurisdictions such as Ireland, Iceland and Canada (British Columbia and Ontario), the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the Citizens’ Assemblies on Brexit, in addition to existing quantitative survey data on the matter. Accordingly, a blueprint mechanising its implementation, building upon the learned experiences from the use of Citizens’ Assemblies elsewhere and paying due regard to the importance of input, throughput and output suggests potential emanations of Citizens’ Assemblies that may be best suited to the UK. To address accountability concerns, given the existence of the Electoral Commission and as a response to the political trend towards placing fetters on the regulator, it is suggested that the Electoral Commission becomes the inaugural body of constitutional significance. Such an approach learns from the constitutional statutes established in Thoburn v Sunderland City Council that display the UK constitution’s potential for dynamism. The legitimacy of this preposition is derived by virtue of incorporating focus group data which displayed an interesting consensus towards a willingness to place more trust in the relatively unknown Electoral Commission rather than their elected representatives. However, concerns remained in relation to the ability of the government to corrupt or impact the work of the Electoral Commission. As such, constitutionalisation would go some way to allaying these concerns. While these two approaches are posed as solutions, it is concluded that they are best understood as mechanisms that have the potential to work in a fruitful symbiosis towards re-establishing the constitutional order, working in tandem with the existing institutions of the state in order to re-establish public trust in the long term.

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