Power to the People!

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) is currently consulting on 'Participatory Budgeting: A draft national strategy – giving more people a say in local spending'.

The DCLG states that "participatory budgeting engages people in taking decisions on the spending priorities for a defined public budget in their local area. This means engaging residents and community groups to discuss spending priorities, make spending proposals, and vote on them, as well giving local people a role in the scrutiny and monitoring of the process".

The proposals emerged from the DCLG's Community Empowerment Action Plan, which was published in November 2007, following ten participatory budgeting (PB) pilots – of which there is an independent assessment of these projects to download.

In the consultation document, the DCLG states that it wants PB schemes in every local authority area by 2012, involving the devolution of spending decisions on health and police budgets, as well as youth services. One idea in the draft strategy is for decisions to be devolved to ward area committees – but not all councils have these.

However, it is unclear exactly how much or which parts of the local government budget will be devolved to PB schemes. As people and participation.net notes "the amount of power devolved has tended to be larger in Latin America where participatory budgeting was developed compared to in Europe and North America". So consultation responses might want to think about which areas or what percentage of the council budget should be devolved.

The first participatory budgeting scheme developed in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in the late 1980s, under the now ruling Workers Party. In the UK, you can find out more about PB from the Participatory Budgeting UK website and from people and participation.net.

The campaigning organisation Involve has produced a useful briefing paper on participatory budgeting, which provides a good academic consideration of the issue.

PB has also been trialled with young people. The National Youth Agency (NYA) states that PB provides "opportunities for young people to develop an active citizenship role" and "to engage with, and feel ownership of their community". The NYA website has some useful information and research on PB as it applies to young people.

The consultation document 'Participatory Budgeting: A draft national strategy – giving more people a say in local spending' can be downloaded from the DCLG website and the deadline for responses is 10th June 2008.