Over 100 local people gathered today in Deptford to take part in decision day for the latest Participatory budgeting event run by Lewisham Health NHS Trust and commissioned by Public Health Lewisham. I joined the queue at 9.30, many of those around me nervously clutching their presentation materials, notice boards or hand written notes on coloured cue cards. There was a real buzz, enhanced by lively music to welcome us on a cold but fine morning to the Lady Florence Hall. People were animatedly networking and meeting old friends. 

I chatted to Jenny Couper from the Newgate Cross Charitable Trust, the legacy body of the local New Deal for Communities programme. Jenny was here because the Trust had decided to use £10,000 of their limited funds to invest in the Choosing Health participatory budget, thereby topping up the otherwise available £70k. Jenny recognised that pooling budgets helped keep the Trust at the heart of the community and supported locally based health initiatives. 

Mark Drinkwater from Voluntary Action Lewisham was the host and compered the day, and so he introduced the rules of the scoring, doing a good job putting tense presenters at their ease. He individually introduced the members of the organising team and explained the criteria for scoring bids. Mark stressed the health and wellbeing outcomes towards which the money on offer was being directed. 

Chris Baguma, Public Health Programme Manager, who is involved in commissioning PB as part of the North Lewisham Health Improvement Plan, explained the links to the wider activities of his service, and explained how the NHS locally has been supporting PB since 2008. Over 1000 local people and small groups have been directly involved through the programme in that time. Chris especially praised the commitment of the steering group that had supported the process. 

Like many other small investment PB events they used a 3 minute presentation format, with timekeeping from the back by coloured flags. Presentations were run in batches of 5 colour groups with matching coloured score cards collected between each round. Around 50 groups were presenting from a wide cross section of the community. Programme lead Keji Kazzim explained to me how participation has grown over the last few years from 20 groups to the current total. This year round £250,000 worth of bids have been logged. Keji also explained how the event enabled NHS Lewisham to reach and out work with people in an accessible way. 

Repeating the event over a number of years gave time for groups to develop their voice and improve their community led health work. Drawing out again the great opportunity PB brings to support all aspects of health promotion and community development. Every group, successful or not has the chance of a follow up session with a local community development team to see if they can get funding or support elsewhere. 

The range of projects was wide and represented the less well known members of community such as French Africans, Columbians and Somalia groups as well as the predominately white or Afro-Caribbean population. The scope of services being led by the community encompassed young and old and ranged from befriending, gentle forms of exercise, diet, and stress counselling to more energetic exercise such as rowing or Zumba dance. So Funkacise, Tae Kwando and body movement all featured, as well as community media, pensioner activity classes, anti-smoking groups and ICT projects. Even something as simple as learning and playing chess as a social activity that increased mental well being, reduced stress, kept the mind sharp and led to greater self confidence was on offer. As well as value for money, a theme most groups stressed, education, information and self help (such as a community library that’s setting up a local walking group and healthy eating project) featured strongly. 

It all tapped into current government policy around community activism, community investment towards wellbeing and health prevention. In their partnership working, signposting and targeting of limited resources the community seemed effective.

The only downside was not to seeing more senior officers and politicians there – they are the people who hold the purse strings to much larger sums. It was a great day, achieved a lot, and they would have enjoyed seeing the health promotion work the frontline does day to day being embraced by all. Thanks to the citizens of Deptford for making me feel welcome and for an enjoyable, healthy morning.

I was once employed by a wonderful charity that for 30 years did good things in poor neighbourhoods. We helped people help themselves to make a better place to live. Despite our best efforts the Trustees reluctantly closed the charity because of a risk it would breach charity commission rules by running at a loss. The reason I believe was some petty politicking in our local council, resulting in an unfair and ill considered cut in their financial support to the charity. This happened under the pretence of seeking best value. We were undercut by another charity which said by using volunteers it could do our work for less. Two years later the council realised that wasn't working, so tried to restore our funding. By then we had shut down. 

None of the communities we helped had any say in the matter. I guess it ended up costing the council more in the long run. Oh, and it was a Labour council, in case you wondered.

The message from the council was 'We will look after you, as long as you do what we want'. Of ‘power over’ the community and voluntary sector. Those receiving public funding are generally expected to be grateful, in this case as receivers of a grant. Or reform themselves by becoming more competitive by adopting a ‘least cost’ commercial approach. 

Like those on state benefits today? Who receive the ‘support of the state’ if they better themselves. ‘Power over’ once again, or as sometimes put – an end to entitlements. The message is better yourself, or face the consequences. Like a stern parent talking to unruly children.

David Cameron’s Big Society expressed through its call to citizen action a concept of 'power within'. Primarily of citizens within communities, but also within our relationship to the state. A new era of collective action, accountability, localism and personal responsibility was promised. Yet unless that ideal is matched with other examples of 'power within' in our relationship of 'state and citizen' it will be just be an ideal on which the cynics can feed. ‘Power within’ implies much more in the way of equality and influence.

As a citizen I feel I’ve less control than ever. Our economic security depends on the whim of gamblers within a financial system which is also driving up inequality in our society. Our political class enjoy shrinking democratic mandates as voters turn away from the ballot box towards more direct action. Church leaders prevaricate over which ‘camp’ to be in., the press remains unaccountable and under the ownership of private interests as the Leveson enquiry shows. Lawyers enjoy huge fees for commercial contract law or taking out injunctions for the wealthy. Whilst shrinking legal aid denies most of us recourse to the law.

The Big Society is a deal. Our political leaders have said what they want of us to help fix our broken Britain , and many of us already do it willingly. Now we need to say clearly to our political leaders the things which we believe are right. We need to speak out. That means a more participatory, active and open democracy. After all, it’s our taxes that pay for our democracy.

Let's be adults and transact our civil business as equals. That’s why I support the People’s Budget: http://www.thepeoplesbudget.org.uk/ 

Last week I attended a workshop called Local Engagement in Democracy hosted by Involve.  They had, with the Institute of Volunteering Research and NCVO, recently completed research into how people participate throughout their lives.

The final report of the research was interesting reading and I was quite excited about what the workshop would throw up.

The main findings from the report, for me, were that people participate in different ways and at different levels throughout their lives.  In fact, despite trying very hard, they couldn’t find anyone that hadn’t participated at any level ever.  Even people that thought they didn’t participate, when they thought about it further, had actually participated.  Even if that was going to scouts as a child or donating to charities.

The other thing is that participation is a deeply personal choice, that is largely based initially on a personal connection or realisation.  It’s also voluntary.  So, given that motivation, organisations cannot actively ‘make’ people participate.  They do it of their own free will because it’s something that they feel a connection to.  Organisations can do more, once the connection is created, to help ensure resources, access, information and support are readily available.  But there is little an organisation can do to create that emotional connection for potential participants.  

We often talk about reaching the unengaged, those that don’t participate at the public level, but if we take the learning from this research – beyond providing them with the information, access and resources to participate – there is a real possibility that many of these people will never engage because there’s no emotional connection to the public participation on offer.

And is that a bad thing?  What participation levels are we willing to accept?  There are two issues here, and ones that are frequently brought up by PB practitioners.  These are, on the one hand, public bodies want a fair representation of the community involved in public participation.  This is both to ensure that the concerns, ideas and issues of all sectors of the community are heard and addressed, if possible.  It’s also to ensure that the public body isn’t discriminating or alienating any one group of people.  Plus, having fair representation will help to legitimise any public participation.  And on the other hand there is the real issue of there being groups of people that are significantly more marginalised from society than others, and often they have most need of public support and services.  Thus, in communicating better with them, services are more likely to be aligned to their needs.  

There’s also the perception that participation is a ‘good thing’.  And to an extent, perhaps this is true.   But is it always?  And for whom?  And is it really productive for community engagement professionals, communications experts, neighbourhood managers and other officers and councillors to continue to bang their heads against walls trying to get people to engage that simply don’t want to?  I know, a controversial thought from a PB person.  

I’m not sure I’ve found all the answers on this yet, but this report provides some food for thought and ties in nicely with the international research we were involved in earlier in the year, which looked at who participates in PB processes.  Having now read this report, and discussed a number of these ideas and issues at the workshop, I’m keen to explore how these two pieces of research might be brought together, so we have a better understanding of who is and who isn’t participating in PB and why – and what we can do to enable participation, and what we can’t.  

You can download the report here.  The findings from the international research should be available towards the end of the year.

When I began working with Participatory Budgeting initiatives with Bradford Vision, The Local Strategic Partnership there,  one thing that began to strike me was that a ‘mini PB’  culture began to evolve. If a pot of money became available, people would almost automatically think, how can we use this for PB?.Something  similar now seems to be happening in the  Eastfield area of Scarborough.  Since 2009, when funds were made available through the NorthYorkshire Police Authority, for a Participatory Budgeting  pilot exercise,  Eastfield has been at the forefront of developing  PB in  a local context.  For the 2010 event, the Parish Council set aside a proportion of its precept  to provide a ‘pot’ for the PB decision day, and this year the precept amount is £15k, topped up with £3k from the local Housing Trust 

The Residents’ steering group  then began to look further  afield, with the result that an event was held at Overdale Primary School, using one thousand pounds, provided 50/50 from the Parish Council and Housing Trust.  Chris Parsons, the Group’s chair, said, ‘It just seemed an obvious next step, to take it (PB) into the schools’

  The children at the school, aged between four to eleven, were asked to come up with ideas for school improvements, which they did, ranging from sports equipment to the setting up of a ‘chill out’ quiet area.  Supporters of each idea then gathered in a school hall, in front of display stands they had designed themselves, and promoted their schemes to the entire school, who visited the hall, class by class. One child asked, ‘Can we vote for our own.?’ When told yes, she said ‘Oh cool’. Everyone at the school (pupils, teachers, other staff) was provided with three tokens, and were asked to vote for their favourite three projects, by placing a token in a bucket by the relevant stand. 

Everyone, from the reception class upwards, took the process very seriously: there was a certain amount  of ‘lobbying’ by the project supporters, making for a very lively atmosphere, but nothing untoward – whilst the teachers involved maintained general order in terms of explaining the process and shepherding the classes to and from the voting area, everyone involved seemed to ‘get’ the importance of maintaining the integrity of the process, having had a good deal of input into its design and delivery. 

In the end 7 out of 18 proposals were funded. Vicky Logan, the school’s head, thought the event had been very successful. 

‘Very good at getting the whole school working on  a shared project. This is really important.’

  There was a general sense of wanting to do this again, funds always permitting.  

On the principle of ‘catch them young’, it’s great to see awareness of PB and its possibilities spreading to this part of the local community. So what’s next? On the walk back from the school Chris pointed out a local roundabout, currently overgrown. ‘The plan is to get everyone to vote on what to do with that’. And why not?

Lots of people are debating the localism bill at the moment. Asking if ideas like the ‘right to challenge’ will empower communities. In one of those conversations on a social networking site a heartening picture was painted of various public services working together to protect a frail and recently bereaved 90 year old. Enabling her to remain independent and living in her own home. The correspondent painted a picture of such service as being an example of the Big Society, but was also worried about the dangers of localised self-interest replacing a well tried democratic system. She contrasted the dangers of localism (with the pushy getting their way) with the possibilities of a fairer and more communal life in a  Big Society.

Like her I think the urge of humans to build social capital is universal, and something that The Big Society idea neatly taps in to. Though of course there are other urges, such as our ability to be exploitative, deceitful, to gang up on the weak and to act as free riders on the resources of others that are linked to our 'success' as a species. The challenge surely for a civilised society is to find some ethical and just balance between these competing forces within all of us. So we preserve what’s best and censure the worst.

Whilst I am heartened by her description of the care wrapping around her elderly mother, I would point out that her examples of the GP, the housing association and social services are precisely NOT the Big Society. These are public servants paid for through taxation (or by controlled social housing rents).

The danger I see is that ‘hand in hand’ with the Big Society is the dismantling of much of what is good under a set of economic market concepts, and a predominant ethos of self interest as the creator of wealth. Individualised wealth perhaps, but not social capital.

The correspondent that prompted my blog also painted a picture of the potential for democracy to become hijacked by vested interest - the pushy and the privileged, who know how to use the system. Of course the problem is that our democracy is not very healthy. As the media scandal at News International at the national level only shows.

The sad thing though is that pattern is often repeated locally too, with a commonality of interest between local media, politicians and private business interests. So yes, the threat of localism is its ability to enable these dark forces to despoil our countryside, privatise our care homes, corrupt our politicians and stigmatise the poor. The biggest check on them has traditionally been a strong and confident public service ethos.

Sadly few people bother to vote in local elections. Local government stifled by a centrally controlled system and the massive frontloaded cuts on local councils has simply created huge paralysis. There is little evidence I can see of strong process being promoted around what to cut and what to protect. Resulting in a huge and wasteful de-skilling of the public sector. In a few years as our hugely costly (privatised) prisons overflow we'll rue the day we sacked all those dedicated (and cheap) youth workers.

I only hope in 5 years other 90 year olds can be surprised that the system somehow works. Already for many in poor areas it simply doesn't.

Are there any solutions? Well, a more radical devolution of power might help, as well as a new rhetoric that praises public service rather than denigrating it. Plus some stronger processes to open up local commissioning and budgeting. Not sure this localism bill will bring that.

An interesting idea from Japan. A form of participatory budgeting. 1% of local council expenditure is ring-fenced for investment in building civil society. Local people, not politicians, have the say where it goes. 1% doesn't sound much. But in a city like Manchester that would be an investment of well over £10million into 'the big society'. Across the country it could replace a huge swathe of funding being lost to the third sector. Sadly nothing like that is in the localism bill.

Do our politicians not trust us enough to give real power over 1%, preferring to con us into thinking we will have power over the whole pot?

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.

The master class was funded as part of the Take Part Pathfinder project.  The aim of the afternoon was to introduce PB to both residents and statutory stakeholders and the attendees were a good mix across these two constituencies and included representatives from a wide range of residents associations as well as officers from housing associations, Salford City Council, Greater Manchester Fire Service and Greater Manchester police.

Jez Hall and I gave an overview of PB and especially how it related to the health and police sectors.  Chris Dabbs, from the organisation Unlimited Potential, also spoke on how PB might help improve health outcomes in Salford.

The master class then broke up into three workshops to consider questions around health and wellbeing, crime and community safety and giving citizens a say.

Salford City Council has a history of using participatory budgeting around its highways budget and a local housing provider, Salix Homes, has also recently undertaken some PB  and therefore residents already had knowledge of some PB and had particular questions about how the process had worked in the past. However, the master class enabled people to think about the different ways that PB can be used particularly around tackling health inequalities and anti social behaviour and how the involvement of local communities in putting together PB initiatives can empower people to make changes in their lives and communities.  Feedback from the afternoon was very positive although there was a feeling that one afternoon was too short a time to fully explore the issues raised in the workshops.

I felt there was a great deal of benefit in residents and officers sitting down together to look at how PB might benefit Salford.  PB is often seen as a “top down” process and of course it does need buy in from those who currently hold the purse strings. But the process should as it develops become something the community owns and indeed demands as they become more involved in the process of budget setting.  Bringing residents and officers together to learn more about PB and to see each other’s perspective, concerns and what potential could be identified  is a good start in embedding PB in the community and the fact that the event was oversubscribed led me to believe this is a good way of people coming together to learn about PB.

Some interesting points came out of those discussions.  The one the stuck most in my head was that when people have specific issues with people in other communities (whether they be geographic, cultural, religious, or anything else) you have to address those issues first before you can successfully bring them together.  Several practitioners cited times when they thought just bringing them together to talk about their problems would be sufficient, only to find that shouting matches ensued and community cohesion given a severe blow, rather than improve it.

At PB Unit we advocate the bringing of people together in one physical space (in the form of an event or meeting) so that they can listen to each other and discuss and deliberate the various merits of different projects asking for funding.  And most of the time this works well.  But when there are significant community cohesion issues arising from particular problems, maybe it wouldn’t work so well.  Whilst we’ve always advocated the need for community development and capacity building to run along side and prior to any PB process, perhaps we need to raise this particular point more. 

This led on to the discussion more specifically about the rise of the British National Party (although that’s up for debate) and other racist organisations such as the English Defence League.  As practitioners said, when the specific issues that people had with their neighbours or other community members were addressed, the issues of racism and prejudice went away.  They found that because an issue had developed which hadn’t been resolved, possibly because of cultural misunderstandings, it grew into an issue of race or religion or some other prejudice.  The issue might be noisy neighbours coming in at all hours of the day because they’re working shifts and living in cramped conditions, but it quickly becomes about ‘the polish people’ in general!  Or the issue might be that someone’s been made redundant and is having difficulty finding a job.  They see migrants getting low paid jobs and feel that they’re missing out because other people are getting the jobs.  And that quickly again becomes about ‘others’ getting jobs.  If social housing address the overcramped conditions and get onto the landlords to improve standards and jobwise or Citizens Advice can help with people getting skills and accessing jobs then the issues are resolved and the problem of racism goes away. 

However, where public sector is ill equipped, under resourced or under skilled to deal with the situation the problems escalate.  And this is where the BNP or other similar groups can come in and say things like ‘British jobs for British people’ that those people, feeling ignored and isolated can latch on to and draw hope from. 

Whilst I thought that Question Time last week was interesting in and of itself, I actually thought the reactions of people and the media afterwards were more revealing.  There were a lot of people saying the program showed Nick Griffin up to be the racist that he is and that he couldn’t hold his ground against more experienced politicians.  But a lot of people were also saying that he was bullied and attacked and they felt sorry for him.  The media seemed to dismiss these people as ‘idiots’ or worse, but I think that labelling and ignoring of people’s views is the issue.  They are the same people who feel ignored by their local public sector because issues they have aren’t being dealt with properly, they feel left behind and betrayed by mainstream political parties and they can relate to the underdog in Nick Griffin.  And Question Time only increased his underdog status. 

These people aren’t stupid or idiots.  They may be a minority, but they are a worrying minority.  Unless their issues are heard and dealt with, and unless the mainstream political parties can come up with clear messages that are different from each others, that make sense and are inclusive of the people who feel left behind; and unless they can find a way to rebuild the trust that was lost in the MPs expenses scandal, they will continue to lose votes to the BNP and other similar parties. 

Community cohesion isn’t a racism issue (sometimes it is, but it isn’t always), it’s a people not getting along well with their neighbours issue.  And that issue is exacerbated as resources become scarcer.  And it’s not just an issue for community development workers to address.  It’s an issue that needs to be addressed by all local public sector agencies, all political parties, and everyone in their communities.  Sending people ‘back to their country’ isn’t the answer – working out how you can live with them, be heard and understood – that is. 

And this is where PB comes in (you knew it had to come in somewhere!).  PB is a way of bringing people together (once you addressed the underlying issues) to build that community cohesion – for people to find out what they have in common, not just what’s different and to realise that they all can live together, get involved in their communities, have a say on how money is spent and share what resources are available. 

The only way to stop the rise of the BNP and other similar organisations is to stop labelling those people that vote for them as ‘other’ and ‘not like us’ and really listen to them and deal with their problems – and then bring them together to discuss issues of salience where they have real power to decide how money is spent (but not in a Barnet way – but that’s a whole other blog!).  There will always be a few hardcore racists that won’t change their mind, but the majority of people just want to get on with their lives in peace – and it’s that they feel is being jeopardised at the moment. 

A journalist friend of mine who group up in inner city Manchester describes waiting at a bus stop when he was in his late teens on a wet cold night.  A flash car drew up and when the window was wound down he saw the driver was someone who he used to go to school with. A conversation ensued the gist of which was “aren’t you a mug, carrying on with your studies? Where is it getting you?”.   Individuals and communities have to see that justice is done and that people do not benefit from ill gotten gains.

Legislation allows for the assets of crime to be seized.  Last year, in an effort to ensure that the public benefited from this money, members of the public were able to suggest suitable projects for funding  to their Local Criminal Justice Board.  These were sifted by the Board and the people could have a say on their preferred project via a website.  Then a panel approved funding of what it judged to be the best projects.

This is laudable but it could now be  taken a step further.  If the money was devolved to areas which people define as their communities, if individuals were able to vote themselves and if what they voted for was where the money went.  If people were able to get together, perhaps on line through a blog or even better had the opportunity to meet face to face to discuss projects and have time to deliberate.  An opportunity for old and young, and people from different backgrounds to come together.  Divided up this way the individual amounts of money might not be large but the benefits in terms of people understanding where the money had come from and seeing the results in their own community would be great. It might be that this money could be added to other pots of money – from the police, the fire service and the local council.  Small amounts added together which can make a real difference to people’s ownership of what is happening in their own community.

But that (the cost) is for another blog, maybe. We decided to do so partly because of the impending general election and the distinct possibility of a change in the complexion of the government, but also because the current political and financial climate presents a real opportunity for the development of PB in the UK. At the meetings we have tried, with the help of guest speakers from various backgrounds, to put PB into the wider context of pressure on public spending and the need to restore confidence in democracy.

Attendances have been mixed, but the delegates have engaged enthusiastically and the mood has been positive. Notwithstanding the fact that all parties will be keeping their powder dry on the detail of their policies, there is now a clear consensus on the importance of involving local people in the decisions that affect them. Obviously the key issue for all the parties is the perceived need to cut public spending. There is a real danger that the election will become a “who is talking the toughest” competition and the real issues will be lost. It is imperative that do all we can to emphasise the potential impact of spending cuts on the most vulnerable communities and the need to involve local people in spending decisions. Scarcity of available resources can put pressure on community cohesion and, again, PB can serve as a tool to mitigate the risk of extremism.

The opportunities for PB to take its place in the mainstream political agenda are there, but we have to be careful that it is not hijacked to deliver outcomes that are not consistent with what we want to see.

I most definitely do not have the answers to that, but I am working on a project with the International Centre for Participation Studies and CFE to try and find some answers.  I must just point out – we’re not doing evaluation ourselves, we’re researching it to find out the most useful ways for projects to evaluate themselves.  We’re not involved (except on the margins) with the SQW/CLG evaluation and this project is different from that. 

We interviewed a number of stakeholders at four different projects over the summer and sent out a questionnaire version of the interview questions to the other projects that we could find contact details for.  We got quite a good response rate to that – 20 out of about 60, which is about a 33% response rate, during the summer when everyone is away.  Which just goes to show the relevance of the subject.  Then we took the information we’d gathered from the interviews and questionnaires to a workshop with some other non-practitioner (with the exception of Bill) interested PB stakeholders.  These included consultants involved in evaluating regeneration activities, academics, third sector people involved in participatory evaluation and think tank people. 

We had a very lively and engaged debate with them around five key questions we had coming out of the interviews and questionnaires. 

From all of that we plan to develop some tools but we realise that one set of tools probably won’t fit all, especially given the level of innovation and diversity currently happening in the UK PB projects.  So we may develop a number of ‘pathways’ to help projects think about their project and what evaluation they want or need and then provide a number of tools to fit different scenarios. 

But this isn’t all altruistic behaviour, at least not on the part of the PB Unit.  We recognise that for our own ongoing reputation and work we need to start to provide a more comprehensive national picture of PB, both in terms of the similarities and differences in PB projects around the three countries that PB is currently happening.  So we need the tools in order that projects can provide us with relatively consistent information that we can compare across projects. 

We’re just at the beginning of this project – having gathered information and views from different stakeholders we’re embarking on a long and interesting journey.  So if you’d like to be involved or be kept informed of our project, please do let us know and we’ll do our best. 

This is a complex issue, and beyond the scope of this particular blog!  There is though an absolute requirement to work through the practicalities of how small grants PB programmes (if maintained over the long term) would function alongside sustainable mainstream initiatives, and what their function might be, above and beyond creating initial interest in PB.

I used to work for Bradford’s Local Strategic Partnership.  We did a lot of useful work but one of the key frustrations many of us shared was the ‘natural wastage’ syndrome, whereby a lot of interest was initially created in a ‘new neighbourhood structure’ resulting in well attended meetings and genuine action, but once the novelty had worn off, and initial pressing issues discussed and addressed (or otherwise, depending on their complexity, available funding etc!) the attendance at meetings inevitably dwindled. It then became increasingly difficult to maintain momentum, without the ‘assistance’ of a major local issue blowing up (proposed school closures, traffic incidents etc). People would complain of the meetings turning into ‘talking shops’, which  also became increasingly dominated by ‘gatekeepers’, community activists who would  provide  lot of energy and input into their neighbourhoods,  but whose own agendas  were not always those of the community as a whole.

Bradford Vision also developed a pilot programme of PB initiatives, and I was able to take the learning from this into my work with the PB Unit.  I’ve since worked closely with several steering groups delivering PB in other areas of the country, and have been struck time and again by how effective this process is in terms of securing and maintaining involvement from  residents, as well as that of elected members and officers

When people grasp the underlying idea behind PB, they tend to understand the point of the process, and therefore have trust in it.  Just as importantly, within a ‘small grants’ programme, where an event is planned, publicised, delivered, and the resulting projects monitored for effectiveness of delivery, there is an extensive range of tasks for people to become involved in.  This cuts through the ‘talking shop’ syndrome at a stroke. There are examples of residents having done everything from catering support to door to door surveys, designing publicity and managing computerised scoring systems.
All this community capacity building can be provided for a relatively small outlay, most of which is in any case returned to the community through projects receiving funding.   When ‘small grants’ programmes become established, the ‘community knowledge’ developed could be made  available to service providers, whilst local people engaged in small scale PB would be very well placed to contribute to mainstream PB processes.

If parallel small grants and mainstream PB processes were developed within given areas, residents would have the opportunity for ongoing engagement at whatever level they felt appropriate, right through from helping make tea to decision making  regarding strategic resource allocation.  And wouldn’t that be interesting?