A despondent view (not just my own) that for all the rhetoric about the army of volunteers that can plug the gaps resulting from spending reductions, unless the right structure and the means to make it happen are in place, where will these volunteers go? What will they do? Many smaller charities are rightly in despair they are about to lose the local authority funding that underpins their work and so supports volunteering.

Without that money they can’t operate, and running volunteers isn’t about exploiting cheap labour. To be effective volunteers need support, maybe training and expenses, and need to feel they are getting something out of the experience. Volunteers are picky about what they do, and by definition can just leave if they don’t like it. More importantly the first steps into volunteering can be the hardest. Without encouragement people can find it a challenging step to take on the role of volunteer.

It’s ironic just when we need a strong civil society infrastructure the funding tap is being turned off for the very organisations that make it possible. Potentially leaving people on one hand desperately needing support, and others unsure how to join in with the big society. What we seem to need is some form of clearing house, a mechanism to coordinate the different resources, both financial and non financial, that exist within a locality of community. What we’ve seen at the PB Unit from our small grant events is that Participatory budgeting (PB) can contribute to a bigger society. 

Firstly PB can simply be used to decide more fairly who gets a share of the limited resources on offer. Even if the available money is going to be less than before there is lots of scope for changing the way the decision is taken on the remainder. Lots of scope to open up more commissioning decisions for example. And there is a certain lack of logic in saying local government needs to shrink and then saying the same body has to decide itself where to cut. No surprise if outside agencies, charities and non statutory services suffer first. Its only natural for service managers, if left to decide without scrutiny, to favour their employees over those in outside bodies, however charitable or worthy those bodies may be.

Secondly, what we have seen from following different PB experiences is that when lots of people contribute to a decision you get money driven right down to where its most needed and most effective.  PB small grants events can therefore be more accessible than old style ‘committee led’ grants particularly to very local groups.

Thirdly we often see that through meeting people at PB decision days that community partnerships form and people make new friends reducing a sense of isolation. Decision days also create new ideas and renewed energy for local groups and participants. Existing but untapped civil action can often be released through a well structured PB event.

I think it could do even more. It could become an innovative mechanism to unite individualised or personalised budgets. It would be really interesting if all those requiring care or local services could combine their resources to group purchase services. Whether it is cooking healthy food or mobility exercise classes, arts events or learning opportunities, specialised home care services. They could all come to pitch their services and pick up new clients at a local PB decision day event.

There is a role for local councils here in continuing to provide support for local development in a new, more social age. They need to be the facilitators of the big society.  PB is not just about local council funding. All sorts of decisions about limited resources could be decided in a more participatory way.  My view is the local council structure is essential to regulate the ‘social’ or big society’.

Citizens can and must do more than vote once every few years.  Its not enough to pay your taxes and then leave the state to provide for us.  All of us can and should participate more in our local community, and taking part in PB events can be a good way to do it. So some more PB please, not less, the decision should be ours, now more than ever.

The Shetlands are in a unique position. Unlike the rest of the United Kingdom the Council is not as yet facing the sharp cuts that the rest of the country is struggling with because they have revenue from oil.   Nevertheless engaging with residents, identifying priorities and enabling local people to participate in decision making are just as important in Shetland as anywhere and because of this the Council applied to be one of the Scottish PB pilots.

The pilot is taking place on an estate called North Staney Hill which is made up of 1960s public housing and the adjoining area of Hoofields which is a small group of prefab type housing soon to be demolished and rebuilt.  This is a close knit community with well kept gardens and a recently refurbished community centre but there are issues with some of the housing being used for temporary lets which has led to some tensions with a view that some who live in the short term accommodation bring the area down.  It is quite apparent that many people love living in North Staney Hill perched as it is on the edge of Lerwick. As one resident put it “it’s got the benefits of living in the town and the country”.  But residents expressed concern that an address, particularly in Hoofields, was associated with anti social behaviour.

The PB initiative is aimed at bringing the community together. The Council have added some money to the pot and there is now £40,000.   Over recent months a questionnaire has gone to all residents asking about their priorities for improving the area.  Bids are now being sought from both community and non-profit making organisations based on the priorities identified in the survey – improving the environment, activities for young people and support for the elderly. The decision day is 25th September.

Apart from helping the Shetlands team to design the decision day I also talked to officers about how PB might be used in more mainstream budgets. 

The Shetlands are an amazingly beautiful place and the people are extremely welcoming and friendly. Whilst at present not suffering quite the cuts that we are doing “down south” priorities will need to be rethought and reshaped.   I think there could be huge potential for developing PB in Shetland .  The islands are by their very nature a  well defined geographical area, there is good local media.   People expect good services but the  fact they have had the “oil money” means that mostly people haven’t thought about priority setting and what services the Council should or should not provide directly.  If the pilot is a success PB in Shetland could go from strength to strength.

I can understand the attraction of engaging with potentially large numbers of residents, without the cost of officer time and of promoting and supporting face-to-face events. I am even prepared to accept that the majority of councils planning to go down this road will sincerely factor the views expressed into the decisions they make. But in doing so, no-one should kid themselves that this will empower communities or result in greater transparency and accountability. Nor will it promote cohesion or build citizen capacity or do anything to build trust between statutory bodies and local people. Those outcomes are only achievable through proper deliberation, bringing different sections of a community together, listening to the perspectives of others, a genuine dialogue about which services are most important to people and how they can best be delivered and, ultimately, collective decision making.  All this might be harder and takes a bit more time and effort, but anything else is tokenism and will do nothing to contribute to the “Big Society”.   

I have to say, having read it, the top headline is it’s a painful time for pretty much everyone.  And there seems to be a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul (or the other way around).   These come in the guise of efficiency and value for money.  I’m sure there probably are some genuine efficiency and value for money savings out there (such as reducing spending on consultants by central government), but some of them are definitely phoney (such as the shared central government back office contact centre thingy – or whatever it’s called – presumably so designed just to drive anyone wanting to phone the civil service completely mad).  Apparently it’s all called ‘Smarter Government’.  Seems a bit like an oxymoron.   

And at a time when everyone is feeling miserable – they go and increase duty on alcohol – so we can’t even drown our sorrows in a glass of wine (or two).  I know, I know, the health benefits blah, blah, blah.  But what the government has failed to realise is that people are drinking to try and be happier.  If they did other things that made us happier, we’d drink less.  Such as enabling people to have more say and ownership over their lives and their neighbourhoods.  I think just about everyone is fed up of nanny state-ism.  And yes, I’m well aware that drink doesn’t make you happier – but it does for a little while anyway.  And what you know and what you feel can be two entirely different things. 

But I stray from the point.  I think possibly the only good news is for first time buyers – if there are any. 

 But squirreled away on page 98 (of several hundred pages) is a box about Total Place.  We’ve all been hearing about Total Place for a while now, but to be honest, I’m not really sure how many people have actually got their heads around it.  In a bid to try and help my poor head, I went to an IDeA conference on Total Place for the third sector on Tuesday.  To be honest, most of what was said didn’t directly relate to anything we were doing, but I did come away feeling like I understood it better and where possibly PB might fit in. 

All the speakers there were anxious that we know that Total Place isn’t just about efficiency savings.  In fact, it’s supposedly primarily about giving people a say over their local areas and tailoring services to local needs.  Which is funny, as that’s exactly what we’ve been saying for years.  But at least we’re all on the same page.  Key to that is involving people.  And this is where I think PB comes in.  It’s a very good tool for involving people and giving them a direct say over what happens in their local area and enables services to be targeted more effectively.  PB can help facilitate the main aim of Total Place. 

If we go back to that box on page 98, then we’ll also see that although Total Place is about identifying duplication and being more efficient (and hence saving money) – central government doesn’t intend to take all the money that’s saved through Total Place back.  Which is a good thing – if they do what they say.  And some of that money that’s not clawed back can be reallocated locally as determined by citizen priorities through PB!  Plus with all that information about budgets and what’s being spent in the area flying around, we can throw in some citizen budget literacy at the same time.

See, a nice neat circle, where PB ties Total Place up with a bow.  Of course, in reality, it’s unlikely to work quite like that.  But, we can promote the idea and encourage areas to give it a go. 

So yes, it’s a difficult time.  We all knew that it would be.  It will be painful.  There might even be more drinking, despite the extra duty (except for the poor Cornish farmers who now can’t afford their own cider).  But, the best way to get through it is to involve everyone, share responsibility and ownership, build trust and accountability – all of which is what PB does very well.  We might even have some empirical evidence to start proving it soon! 

Could we see a way to clearly link participation by residents and a vibrant third sector? The report, Commissioning and the Community Sector by The Kindle Partnership — which incorporates Action with Communities in Rural England, BASSAC, Children England, Community Matters, National Association for Voluntary and Community Action, and the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services — has been published because it says community groups are often reluctant to get involved in commissioning because they lack information about the process and the risks involved. (see more at http://www.cypnow.co.uk/bulletins/Daily-Bulletin/news/990696 )

Their guide offers much useful advice and guidance to enable public money to be accessed by community level organisations. And this made me think- this is what PB does as well. Through the many community grants processes we have seen small local organisations pick up funding that would otherwise be unavailable to them. When a community comes together to decide funding almost invariably they know who can deliver locally, and they want to back local solutions.

This relates (in my view) to a much older paper by the New Economics Foundation called “Plugging the leaks”, which identified how public spending can leak out of an area through consultancies, by purchasing outside the district, or employing the wrong delivery model. It persuasively argues that if money can be made to circulate within the local economy, rather than leak out of it, you can generate a useful multiplier effect. Every pound of public money can generate extra resources again and again and again, creating jobs and stimulating the local economy. Bottom up regeneration of this kind is much more sustainable and leaves a local legacy. (See http://www.pluggingtheleaks.org/)

Yet public sector commissioning is structured in a way that makes it unobtainable where its most needed. The Social Enterprise Coalition has been especially exercised about commissioning and it’s answer is more collaboration. Its encouraging smaller organisations to build partnerships to access these big contracts. The problem is the sector is ill prepared for the sort of hurdles put in place by our public procurement rules which seem designed to favour the private sector on price over better public or social economy outcomes. Also partnership can lead to mission creep and inefficiency as new ways of working must be re-created. Charity trustees are rightly worried they are being transformed by external forces to do government’s work and losing money and autonomy in the process.

NCVO, BASSAC, the Development Trusts Association and others in the social economy will also recognise this issue. The shrinking of core grants for the community and voluntary sector has caused huge damage, with extra burdens on charities and the smaller local community enterprises. There is a well recognised funding gap opening up, with the voluntary sector effectively subsidising the public sector rather than the other way round.    Carers for example are filling a gap in local health and wellbeing funding, and by doing so save the NHS and therefore all taxpayers millions. Yet individual carers remain in extreme need.    This sort of injustice will only get worse in the coming tight fiscal years.

So how does PB connect to this gloomy picture. Well, in numerous PB events the community now targets thousands of pounds locally into filling just this gap. Community nurseries, personal support services, youth clubs, exercise groups, environmental improvement schemes all do well when the community decides.
As PB has spread the opportunity grows and grows for spending money in communities through some kind of a local decision day. For example there is Newcastle’s Carers UDecide process. Where carers are being put in charge of a significant budget to create the services they need to do their work.    And in Tower Hamlets their PB process this year included new information, bringing a new option to buy top up service investments from the third sector or from the council.

Of course if money available to community enterprises is to grow, so must the robustness behind any decision making process. But part of the answer is already out there, through a new phase of PB using commissioning tables and community contracts. Well known overseas, a budget matrix can begin to provide the rigor that commissioners need to invest in local enterprise.

And that will be good for all. Good commissioning is about connecting local knowledge with technical expertise in new forms of co-production. Procuring the right services at a small scale by tapping into resources already within the community is a sensible strategy. PB does this very well. I think it would end up saving money by more efficient and innovative local delivery. Bringing transparency over how commissioning works, and strengthening local accountability over precious taxpayers money. PB could yet again be a “win, win, win” scenario.

  http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/uploadedFiles/NCVO/What_we_do/Research/Almanac/NCVO_2009_The_State_and_the_Voluntary_Sector.pdf) 

http://www.carersuk.org/Newsandcampaigns/News/1244212361
http://community.newcastle.gov.uk/udecide/?p=27

We had been invited by COSLA (The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities) who are coordinating the programme and working with Scottish Local Authorities and Community Safety Partnerships to deliver PB work on the theme of Anti Social Behaviour. Our role is to work with COSLA to provide support and guidance to the pilots.

The pilots are part of a series of proposals in the Scottish Governments Community Empowerment Action Plan which was approved in 2009.

Five LA’s have been chosen for the work following an initial submission;

• North Lanarkshire (Forgewood)
• Fife (Glenrothes)
• Stirling (Dunblane)
• Shetland Islands
• South Lanarkshire (Overton)

Four representatives from each of the areas was present and included officers, elected members, and residents . Following introductions and some initial presentations from the PBU the rest of the day saw lively discussions taking place about how best to take the work forward. By the end I feel sure that our Scottish colleagues had found out more about PB and how it might be applied to their situations and we found out more about how things work north of the border. Of particular interest to us was the Scottish Performance Measurements and the National Standards for Community Development that will help shape the work.

Whilst some of the pilots plan to deliver small grants based events others are looking already at connecting PB directly to their mainstream work which was most encouraging .

With Edinburgh and Glasgow looking to develop their own PB work it looks like Scotland will have considerable practice to look at by the end of 2010.

Best of luck to everyone involved.

This is partly to do with initiatives feeling they need to demonstrate the value of PB to sceptics (especially in uncertain financial and political times) in order to be more sustainable and partly because of the national evaluation being done by SQW.

Most PB initiatives now produce some kind of evaluation, although the focus, quality and type vary significantly.  However, initial outcomes are emerging, providing some interesting data. 

Evaluation is certainly something that we, at the PB Unit, have been thinking about and working on for a while now too.  Local evaluations seemed to be so different from each other that it was impossible to develop any kind of comparison for a national picture.  We also knew that because there’s no requirement on initiatives to do any kind of evaluation that anything we produced for people to complete and return to us had to be something that was also useful and helpful for them.

So over quite a long period of time, and after asking a number of different stakeholders, we, with Heather Blakey at ICPS, started to develop an approach to developing meaningful evaluation locally, with the resources available.  We’re currently testing this and the tools we developed with initiatives, to see if it works.  The purpose of the approach is to enable initiatives to develop their own evaluation framework that’s relevant to their local context, whilst still providing a level of information to the PB Unit that could be comparable across areas.  But its primary focus is developing a local evaluation. 

Entirely separate to this, CLG decided to do a national evaluation and commissioned SQW to do it.  SQW are now about to publish their interim report which provides the baseline, which they’ll build upon and look at changes over time in the next phase.  SQW developed a logic framework for the evaluation, and the primary focus of their tools is comparison data, which is what’s needed for a national evaluation, however, it makes the tools less useful in isolation, locally.  The evaluation, will, hopefully, provide a national snapshot of PB and identify some of the emerging outcomes and areas for improvement. 

In yet another project, Involve are looking at the business case for different participation activities.  They are researching costs and benefits in a fairly broad approach to demonstrate the value of participation.  This research is just starting but has the potential to be quite useful both locally and nationally to make the case for PB.  Similarly Community Development Foundation are putting together research on the value of empowerment and making the case for empowerment. 

We definitely welcome the evaluation activities that are going on and hope that our own contribution is helpful and welcome locally as well as nationally.  Robust and meaningful evaluation that demonstrates the value of PB is something that is most definitely needed, especially in the current economic climate. 

It’s not that I thought that PB was the same around the world – in fact, we often talk about PB being different in the UK from the rest of Europe.  This is largely to do with the reasons why PB was brought to the UK, and who was involved.  And of course, our highly centralised state which limits the amount of say that people can have over budgets locally. 

I don’t know whether it was the language barrier (I don’t speak any German at all, and most of the German speakers there seemed to know limited English) or things lost in translation; but it seemed at times that we were talking about completely different PB.  And then I realised, that PB in Germany is very different from PB in the UK.  We both thought we were talking about the same thing – PB – but it turns out we were talking about different processes entirely which are implemented for entirely different reasons.  This then became a theme, for me, for the conference.

German PB, seems to me to be a more elaborate form of budget consultation.  And it’s done for the purpose of service modernisation.  So because empowerment is not a key objective, who participates and how is less of an issue.  But using the internet for PB is key, because it’s about modernisation and engaging with people in setting budget priorities is a way of modernising services.   If you engage people online, they can engage in a way and a time that suits them – is their rationale.  When I talked about engaging with different ‘hard to reach’ groups by utilising community leaders and existing local networks (for example asking mosque leaders to promote PB to their followers, and using Muslim women’s groups to target women), there was an obvious gasp around the room.  It seems like common sense to us, but to them, it was a completely new idea because it is not their raison d’etre for PB. 

German PB does not involve any decision making on the part of residents.  All views are taken to the local councillors and they make the decision, taking the results of the consultation exercise into consideration.  Which is why I think it’s what we’d call budget consultation.

There was Ernesto Ganuza from Spain talking about PB in Seville too.  The focus of their PB is on poverty alleviation by the redistribution of wealth to poorer people and neighbourhoods.  They use social justice criteria to frame their deliberations about priorities and projects.  The process they follow, however, is very similar to the Porto Alegre model.  This kind of model is something that we can more readily understand in the UK as poverty alleviation – or reducing deprivation – is something that is important to us too, and models that look at allocating mainstream funding for mainstream services is the direction PB seems to be heading here. 

The conference also heard from George Matovu from Uganda, although he was representing PB across Africa.  In Africa (it seems wrong to talk about an entire continent in this way, but this is how he put it) their focus is much more on government transparency, fighting corruption within government and creating greater equality through gender budgeting.  Their processes are designed to address these issues rather than empowerment per se.  Whilst we would agree with these sentiments the issues of corruption and gender inequality are not the same in the UK as they are in Africa. 

All of this left me thinking – if PB is so different in different countries – there are different processes implemented for entirely different (although not always uncomplimentary) reasons – at what point does it stop being PB?  Or if it’s all PB how do you differentiate between the different approaches and purposes so that you’re not left feeling like it’s all lost in translation?

In the end I came full circle, and realised, that PB has to be adapted to local circumstance and local need.  Rather than wondering what is and isn’t PB, we should be looking at other PB processes and other purposes such as greater government transparency, or whether the funding allocated is fairly distributed either to those most in need or across the community as a whole?  Maybe PB has greater potential than is currently realised and perhaps we shouldn’t be so focussed on what we do now that we miss the opportunities to do more.   

Probably it’s also sense that a phoney war is on, as we head towards a May election. This brings its challenges as so much seems to be in holding mode. New policies like the Sustainable Communities Act seem to be on hold or just out of reach, though it has some life as a private members bill. There is despondency around in a lot of organisations supporting community empowerment too, about possible public sector cuts. Might the future for PB be bleak, with little money for residents to be able to influence, and departments looking for cuts, not investments?

On the other hand quite senior figures from all political parties have expressed support for PB in some way. Only recently I was at a conference in London, and two opposition speakers (Tory and Lib-dem) with an interest in community engagement both mentioned PB in a positive light. We have counted as many PB pilots in Conservative councils as in Labour ones doing PB, with the Lib dems also getting the PB story. We still see a healthy number of new experiences coming on stream.

PB is certainly somewhere on political radar. Politicians are aware that public spending cuts ahead mean some unpopular decisions, so may hope PB will help take the nasty taste away. A more cynical view would be that they are wanting to pass responsibility on to electors for those tough decisions. Or as a way to flatter the population at a time when civil servants and politicians are particularly disrespected after lots of bad news stories, such as the MP’s expenses scandals, bankers’ bail-outs and bonuses, the farce of the Copenhagen summit, the housing market bumping along the bottom, and pensions shortfalls. All of this is against the background of a recession where the rich seem to have survived best of all.

On a more positive note the organisers of the conference mentioned above, report growing interest in PB and that it’s a frequently suggested topic for future conferences. We at the PB Unit have seen interest from departments other than Communities and Local Government, and from statutory or public bodies like health authorities, police forces and housing bodies. There are signs of it expanding outside the narrow confines of England too. The Welsh Assembly has recently decided on using PB in schools as part of their review of children’s rights, and have committed £240,000 to produce new resources to make that happen. The Unit is working in Scotland too now. I could go on.

The challenge for the PB Unit is to continue focussing on trying to deepen PB experiences, with added attention on service design, commissioning, and larger mainstream budgets that are open to influence. Nor to forget benefits from improving community understanding and better deliberation.

PB’s still pretty new in the UK and there are lots of ways it could go. Painting a clear vision of where we might be next year, let alone who will be in the parliament after the election is difficult, but I don’t yet perceive our work is done. There is no turning back now, as PB is here to stay.