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?