The Big Society Network and NESTA were in Bristol on Friday for the second Your Local Budget (YLB) learning event on engaging people in local budgets and participatory budgeting (PB). It was good to find six other members of Empowering Communities' eighteen month old PB group also at Colston Hall, and some luminaries from the national scene, including Phil Teece of the Participatory Budgeting Unit and Simon Burall from Involve, down in Bristol again after speaking at our Keeping Empowerment Working event on 10th February.
Ed Wallace of Nesta explained that YLB is about mainstreaming PB, and the focus of the day was on how to connect with local citizens and groups. The emphasis was on electronic rather than face-to-face connection, with strong contributions from Cllr Mark Wright and Stephen Hilton of Bristol City Council on the well-established Bristol Digital Partnership.
The Council has certainly generated an impressive level of interest from local citizens in petitions, webcasts of Council meetings and other initiatives - and in the case of Mark Wright’s ward, a PB-style online initiative to engage local people in deciding how a pot of money for local well-being should be spent. Stephen Hilton’s evident concern to see that all of Bristol’s population has access to its digital services was good to hear, and everyone agreed with him that on-line engagement alone is never enough. Is there any evidence that Bristol’s digital work has influenced the mainstream machinery of its government? When asked, Mark Wright pointed to the unexpected and strongly negative reaction to its plans to turn the Bristol-Bath cycle route into a bus route.
Richard Wilson of IZWE, one of Nesta’s partners in YLB, enthused us with online engagement possibilities, citing Devon County Council’s Tough Choices debate on how to save the Council’s money as a good example. As a Devon resident I must admit it’s only known to me through local complaints that the County Council wouldn’t bring its consultation to Crediton. And Richard didn’t really help his case by pointing out, rather disarmingly, that data from the project showed that 80% of respondents wanted to preserve back-office staff. This led toiling analysts (and instant reaction can generate a lot of analytic toil) to conclude, he said, that as they didn’t know who had responded, the exercise been ‘captured by special interest groups’. So still some way to go on the digital interaction front, it seems.
Leslie Silverlock got the only applause of the day for his workshop on another Devon initiative, the YLB pioneer Dulverton Town Council, where he is a key player in its determined, grassroots, meeting-centred efforts to control the multiple organs of government that defy common sense and comprehension. You’ll be able to read more about it in his paper, which will no doubt be available in due course on the brand-new website which got its first public demo on Friday. So for more background on YLB visit http://yourlocalbudget.org/. Not forgetting all the stuff on PB at the Participatory Budgeting Unit, or the report from the South West’s PB group’s Money Where it Matters conference back in the Autumn.
So where does this leave mainstreaming PB? For answers I went to Nesta’s paper Your Local Budget. This makes some important points about the possibilities of PB for creating greater public involvement in real decision-making - this can lead to decisions politicians would not have dared to take. And the paper doesn’t shirk the obvious point that in today’s climate it’s more about sharing decisions on spending less than on spending anything (perhaps we should re-name it Your Local Deficit?). What also stands out from the case studies is the importance of driving this bottom-up process from the top. Only when the biggest budget-holders embrace the technique does it get beyond glorified grant-making. I look forward to seeing how YLB’s crop of pioneers take this forward – and Dulverton certainly shows how a PB approach can galvanise people at the grassroots.
A final thought. Through the public services white paper the government is, in David Cameron’s words “in the process of opening up billions of pounds’ worth of government contracts so charities and social enterprises can compete for the first time”. When Councils have outsourced their services, how will public engagement with the contractors work? Is there a danger that PB may prove to be a bolt for a stable door through which the horse has been led by government policy?
No comments:
Post a Comment