Giving people more control over how their area is run is something all political parties say they want, and The People’s Budget is a new campaign to get a much bigger say for local people on how public budgets are spent. It’s the latest in a series of efforts to interest people in something with a name that is hardly likely to attract headlines and a terrible mouthful to say – Participatory Budgeting.
Persuading local Councillors that their constituents can make better decisions on how to spend money than they can was never going to be easy. So it’s great that the Participatory Budgeting Unit and others are stirring up more interest in the subject, and using a bit of people power to persuade Councils to move on from using PB just to divvy up small grant pots to taking decisions about serious budgets. There’s a good discussion on Toby Blume’s Posterous blog. And there’ll be more here soon, as next week the South West’s PB and Localism Group launches its 52 page guide Localism in Action, which includes 16 pages of case studies tools and tips on PB. Go to Creating Excellence at http://tinyurl.com/5sv38zz for the flyer, and, from 1st November, the guide itself.
Looking forward to seeing the South West Participatory Budgeting guide next week. I've raised concerns about meeting the needs and interests of marginalised groups through participatory budgeting on Toby Blume's blog (link above) and will be interested to see in the guide how SW groups have handled this issue.
ReplyDelete