The Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion has launched the National Conversation, a public listening project that asks people across the UK to say what their community means to them and what kind of country they want to live in. The exercise is being run by the Together Coalition and will gather views through a 10-minute survey, a 60-second voice note and thousands of small group discussions.
The commission is co-chaired by Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas, and includes Sara Khan, Andy Street, Laura Marks, Caroline Lucas and Tim Montgomerie. It is asking a direct question about what it means to be British, English, Scottish or Welsh, and what connects people to their neighbours and makes the country feel like home.
The scale of the effort is the point. Melinda Mills said AI had “revolutionised” the ability to conduct mass listening exercises, allowing organisers to pick up “the language people choose, the emotional register, the texture of how they actually talk about their communities.” The commission plans to combine that public response with academic research, expert testimony and the commissioners’ own deliberations in a report due later this year.
The launch lands after polling from the British Red Cross last month found that 75% of UK adults believe Britain is divided as a country, while 72% said it has become more divided over the past five years. Javid said the country is “in real peril” and warned that unless people recover a shared sense of what they have in common, Britain risks being torn apart by its differences. Cruddas said rebuilding the country’s social fabric and sense of community has “never been more urgent,” adding that the answers do not lie in Westminster but in communities up and down the country.
The commission has already taken evidence on housing, education, the economy and trust, drawing in figures including Michael Gove, Mary Beard, Paul Johnson and David Cameron. That earlier work set up the latest phase of the project, but the new exercise moves beyond formal testimony and into the lived experience of people who are being asked to describe their own neighbourhoods and futures in their own words.
That matters because this is not just another consultation in a fraught and fractured political climate. It is an attempt to measure whether the national conversation can still be rebuilt from the ground up, and whether enough people are willing to describe a country they believe can still hold together.
