Parish councils: an unlikely hothouse for community development?
I know participatory budgeting is, to many, a rather artificial, over-engineered and fashionable an approach to community development.
To a ruralist, like me, it might also appear to be exotically urban with its case studies and heritage from Porto Allegre, Berlin, Seville and closer to home in London, Newcastle and Southampton.
But last month I spent a few hours hearing how participatory budgeting is beginning to flourish in the perhaps unlikely hot house environment of parish and town councils.
In a small seminar hosted by the National Association of Local Councils and the Participatory Budgeting Unit I heard how parish councils in Norfolk, North Yorkshire, Cheshire and Herefordshire are exploring participatory budgeting. The results are leading to more interest and engagement from previously apathetic local residents. It is resulting in the novel situation (for some places) of local people actually talking to each other about local issues. Sometimes it is also bringing together the principal local authorities and the parish and town councils, together with their respective councillors, in more supportive relationships than before.
County Associations of Local Councils are finding participatory budgeting a great way of energising their member councils. And the more I hear of their experience, the more it makes sense. Parish and town councils are often the right scale to deploy participatory budgeting. They usually cover distinct geographical communities and their councillors know many local people and are able to mobilise them into participating, into deciding how public money should be spent locally. Whether this is local people’s own money (the parish precept added on to their Council Tax bills) or else some external pot of money.
Yes, there are still challenges aplenty. From suspicious councillors to dyed in the old wool parish clerks. But the results are starting to confound sceptics. In particular, participatory budgeting, when done well, leads to plenty of enthusiasm for projects and those projects being far more rooted in and owned by their local communities than would have been the case if they had been decided by public officials and by ‘the council’.
Some of us at the seminar began to explore whether this same approach to direct democracy could in future be applied to the Total Place initiative we keep hearing so much about. For example, using the structures of parish and town councils to pull local people together to help decide how public budgets should be spent locally. And ‘locally’ in this context should mean a defined geographical community such as a village or a town rather than a more distant local authority level.
Could directly involving local people in budget and allocation decisions, particularly during these tough times for public expenditure, be part of the answer to the democratic deficit evident in local representative democracy?
Further information on how participatory budgeting can and is working in rural England can be found in the recent report from the Commission for Rural Communities, ‘The experience of Participatory Budgeting in rural England’. This is downloadable from: http://www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk/events/participatorybudgeting
Posted on Monday, 8th March 2010 | This entry has 1 comments
Robert Bullard | Tuesday, 9th March 2010 | 11:11 AM
I agree… I wrote a piece on PB for The Guardian a few years ago… as you say, they are a good way of getting far greater involvement and support for local spending decisions, and that could be (and is) applied to wider areas such as Total Place.
What impressed me in one case was how, when the initiative had run out of money, all the projects chipped in with some of their cash for a project that had not been successful/supported in the decisions but they thought should be funded.