Mark Waters (Manchester, Participatory Budgeting): The OurKingdom discussion of Porto Alegre and Direct Democracy often seems to imply that ideas for localism are completely new to Britain. But the Prime Minister and Hazel Blears aren't taking a complete shot in the dark. Here at Church Action on Poverty we have been developing pilots around participatory budgeting for the last three years, with local authorities and regeneration partnerships. CAP has now founded the Participatory Budgeting Unit, originally funded by the (now defunct) Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, and we are now working with the Department for Communities and Local Government to roll this work out.
Pilot work has involved identifying pots of money to trial the work, building planning groups with local people, and organising large deliberative events at which people vote on how they want money spent. £150K has been spent in Newcastle in outer west wards and £800K using this model with young people; Salford city council have devolved £100K of mainstream highways budget to a local area for a trial with this method. The shift now is from what was really a small grants process to test the model, to developing the work with mainstream budgets. We have positive findings from a recent evaluation, and lots more information on our website. If you know people on public bodies who might be interested in seeing how they might experiment with participatory budgeting please suggest they get in touch with us.
