Q.
We are in the middle of a significant savings exercise (taking £3m out of our £14m net budget over 2 years) and I am thinking about a PB exercise involving choices about where the savings are made. In other words, this isn't about deciding where to spend, but where to cut. Do you have any advice or case studies of a similar exercise?
A.
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There are no examples of this happening in the UK in the manner that you describe. Nevertheless, PB was always about deciding how to spend limited resources, rather than 'extra' pots of money.
I think the way that we would describe it is that participatory budgeting is about enabling people to decide how funds should be spent, not what should be cut (which could be very disempowering). So in a situation where you have a smaller budget than last year, we would suggest the approach should be to ask people to prioritise where the budget should be spent and those things that aren't prioritised don't get as much funding if any at all. And so PB is a budget prioritisation exercise rather than a budget cutting exercise.
That way people are still allocating how money should be spent, not where budget cuts should be made and avoids controversy around whether or not this is really people's responsibility and if elected members are devolving fiscal responsibility too far (which is what happened when budget cutting 'reverse PB' exercises were implemented in the United States).
