Archived decisions

Hampshire County Council

Response to consultation

Participatory Budgeting: a draft national strategy

The County Council considered the consultation at its Cabinet meeting on 10 May 2008.

The County Council has a long record of engagement with its local communities, supporting village halls, making grants to voluntary organisations and consulting fully on local highways improvement and maintenance schemes. It has a countywide Youth Council, has Hampshire Action Teams that deal with local issues which are congruent with its eleven district councils, and gives each of its 78 councillors a local budget of £10,000 each for engagement with their local communities. On top of this the County Council works closely with local partners through the local area agreement, local strategic partnerships and the wide array of other partnership agreements.

The County Council also has an established budget consultation process including stakeholder meetings (business, local council tax payer groups, voluntary sector etc), MORI consultation exercises and citizen panels as well as meeting pressure groups such as IsItFair.

However communities are difficult to define over the wide area of Hampshire. The County Council feels that the proposals put forward are not fully thought through, are designed to deal with problems in small urban areas and lack the evidence base for improvements in engagement and empowerment for local communities on a countywide basis.

The proposals need to reflect fully the role of local town and parish councils in Hampshire. These already have "the power to shape local place and services" and the role of locally elected parish councillors should not be by-passed or ignored.

The results of the consultation exercise should also strongly recognise the strategic role of authorities such as the County Council, and any proposal brought forward should not impact upon their role and purpose.

The County Council is very mindful of its democratic mandate to take budget decisions and be accountable for them. It has well established processes for consultation and understanding the needs and wishes of local communities and does not need additional directives or implementation approaches to participatory budgeting in the new proposed Bill. Proposals should not cut across the democratic mandate exercised by the different tiers of local authority in Hampshire.

The response to the questions in the consultation document are as follows:

· Have we identified the correct work streams and actions to achieve the strategic objective of participatory budgeting to be used in all local authority areas by 2012, if not, what others would you suggest?

The work streams, with their emphasis on piloting, evaluation of those pilots, building into guidance and encouraging rather than directing the approach, appear appropriate. That said, the timetable is not entirely clear and the pilot results should be published as early as possible.

· Do local authorities think they need any additional powers to engage with citizens on spending decisions in this way. If so, what should they be?

The Council believes that the existing powers (to hold polls to ascertain views on services), do not require supplementing bearing in mind that the Council works with all duly elected tiers of local government.

· What would incentivise local authorities to undertake participatory budgeting?

Additional funding would be the most powerful incentive for local authorities to undertake participatory budgeting, whether through addition to general grant aid under the "new burdens" provisions, or through specific grant (accepting that for "start up" of new policy strands, specific grants continue to be appropriate).

· What would help community groups to engage in the process?

The Council suggests that local authorities are best placed to judge the model most likely to produce the right results in their area. The best way of helping community groups to engage in the process would be to avoid restrictive regulations so that local approaches can be developed which are best suited to the needs of particular communities. A one size fits all model is not appropriate - the approach in a large county council such as Hampshire will be quite different to a much smaller, more homogenous single tier authority.

· What barriers are there to local authorities devolving parts of public budgets in this way?

Some budgets are less open to meaningful participation than others, eg where statutory responsibilities needs to be discharged. Care is needed to ensure that there is no pressure to apply the approach in such inappropriate areas. That aside, the main barrier is likely to be the funding position as set out above.

The reason behind this is that, whilst there may be some benefits from broader involvement in budgeting process and more locally sensitive allocation of existing budgets to different priorities, the experience is bound to seem less positive if the participatory outcomes are seen to be at the expense of what might otherwise have been done. An element at least of additional funding would be far more likely to produce results. Indeed, the Council's own successful experiments with budgets devolved to local members - a compatible forerunner to the Government's approach - has been successful largely because the Council was able to make some additional investment. The funding position for the CSR2007 period makes this much less achievable and reinforces the point that the absence of any additional specific funding for participatory budgets would be a barrier.

· How can councillors be given a central role in the use of participatory budgeting?

Local councillors would have a natural role in any participatory budgeting occurring at ward level. They could take the lead in the approach to consulting the local people on their priorities. They could feed in to that process issues raised with them through their constituency work. Preferences expressed would in turn inform their contributions to the determination of the overall Council budget. Again, the key principle would be to allow local authorities to make the arrangements along those lines which best suit local members rather than attempting any central regulation.