Barnet Council has set out plans to work more closely with residents and help communities solve local issues.

Town hall chiefs have drawn up a new strategy that aims to put the community “at the heart of decision-making and service delivery” and enable more residents to become “active citizens”.

Key projects that will test the new “co-production” approach include the creation of a citizens’ assembly on climate change and biodiversity, which is designed to help to boost sustainability and meet the council’s carbon-reduction goals.

The “community participation” strategy was presented to a meeting of the council’s community leadership and libraries committee on Monday. It follows on from a pledge in the Labour group’s local election manifesto for Barnet to become a “listening council” that puts community participation and engagement at its heart.

Will Cooper, the council’s deputy head of strategy, told the committee the document was drawn up to set out the administration’s ambitions about “listening, engaging, co-production, building a trusted relationship with residents and working in partnership with communities”.

The strategy outlines plans to reach out to residents rather than expect them to engage with the council; to be transparent, accessible and open, including about what the council cannot do; and to seek the views of all communities, particularly young people and minority groups.

Labour committee members welcomed the proposals. Ella Rose, a Labour councillor for Whetstone, said the report was “exciting” and “reflects the Barnet we all want to create”.

Plans for the citizens’ assembly on climate change set out in the strategy reveal it will “comprise 40 people randomly sampled from Barnet’s population”. Members will be paid for their work, which will “involve at least 30 hours of facilitated deliberation”.

Conservative councillors questioned the council’s approach to the citizens’ assembly on climate change. Shuey Gordon, who represents Edgware, asked if the assembly should include volunteers who are “passionate about a certain topic”. He asked what was being done to ensure there are people willing to volunteer.

In response, Will said that in order to get a cross-section of society the core assembly would be “randomly sampled” and not necessarily include people who would “automatically put themselves forward”. He added that the council would “generally” remunerate residents if they were doing more than giving their opinion and that participation in the assembly would be quite an “intense” process.

An independent organisation would be used to come up with the random sample of residents, Will explained. Committee chair Sara Conway said it would be a “respected” process that had been used in “a lot of different places”.

Following the debate, the strategy was unanimously agreed by the committee.