‘So,’ said the chief officer of the CVS, with a look somewhere between confused and amazed, ‘you are going to ask residents to spend £70,000 of public money… can you explain exactly how that is going to work again?’
By now I had got used to receiving a ‘mixed’ reception to the idea. The executive member for housing and neighbourhoods had already spent what felt like hours grilling me over the report I had submitted. The funding team, the legal and finance departments, not to mention a number of colleagues, all thought that I had pushed the envelope open too wide this time.
But armed with the knowledge that this was something suggested as good practice by the Local Government Information Unit and with the benefit of a previous pilot in Keighley to copy, I soldiered on.
The idea needed to be adapted to our particular neighbourhood arrangements in Blackburn with Darwen. We had some unspent mainstream community grant money and some NRF money. We were also lucky to have recently completed the neighbourhood priorities campaign, asking people what mattered most to them where they lived. In the neighbourhood priorities campaign, people chose from a list based on the LSP/LAA areas. We would use the same areas (healthier, wealthier, cleaner, greener, smarter, safer, and friendlier) that people wanted improvements around and allocate money to actually make the improvements they – not councillors or officers –wanted. Cash for communities was born.
Application forms were designed, printed and circulated. Quickly enough, they started coming back in. I had kept the process as open as possible to distance it from existing grant processes, removing long lists of conditions and demands for evidence. Some applicants were directed to other suitable grant funds or to existing service providers. The rest were invited to a public meeting to sell their idea.
A neighbourhood renewal version of Dragons’ Den was banded about to describe it. I expected a few back in, maybe a hundred forms. By the deadline date, 240 had come in to the neighbourhood engagement team. Invitations were then sent out to a series of local events for applicants to attend.
I organised a trial run in-house, with the clever electronic voting system lent by CVS. To help keep the presentations to two minutes, I blagged a lane timer from one of the council’s swimming pools. It really was a question of thinking this through as we went along.
But after all the hard work and worrying, the events went brilliantly. More than that, they were moving – for a number of reasons. It was moving to see an older woman shake so much before presenting a project that she could hardly read her notes and then burst into tears when her peers voted for her project. It was moving to see a boy of ten speaking with such confidence and compassion about young people’s needs in the area where he lived. It was moving that the public saw straight through presentation slickness and focused on the quality and sincerity of the proposal being made.
Being part of a shared experience and a genuinely empowering one was moving. Finally, it was moving how many people thought that it was such a massive improvement on having a small panel sit in isolation making such decisions. Even those whose project ideas lost out on the night agreed.
So, has it worked? It has helped resolve many local concerns and resourced groups who are working to do so. It got hundreds of people, many who’ve never filled in a grant form before in their life, involved. It gave real decision-making power to local people.
Yes, it worked and in Blackburn with Darwen, and we are hoping for more of the same in the future.

Billy Maxwell is head of neighbourhood engagement at Blackburn with Darwen Council