From Porto Alegre to Salford - Go Local!

It's been a busy week under the new government with a host or announcements. The key highlights so far have were undoubtedly been the Prime Minister's statement on the constitution and the the press coverage today on Hazel Blear's impending speech on developing participatory budgeting in local communities.

This approach to more localism through "double devolution" from government to local authorities and from local authorities to communities seems to be obtaining all-party backing with the two main opposition parties broadly supporting this agenda too.

What is significant is that instead of just warm words for this in principle, we now seem to be seeing serious proposals backed up by funding to implement the policy following a number of pilots. I am sure we will all watch them with interest.

TCC is currently working on projects for East Sussex County Council in enabling young people to have a say on how money is spent in specific localities. This is just one example of many projects we are working on for a range of organisations to assist with the engagement with communities to help them determine local priorities.

Comments

[LGC]

Hello the Local Government Association actually appears slightly concerned by this as feel the community proposals outlined by Hazel Blears do not involve councillors enough. There is still not enough detail on whether this is triple devolution ie there will be powers devolved to regional, local and community levels

[Charlie Mansell]

Hazel Blears is a former Councillor and former local government employee. As the Guardian interview of yesterday indicated she sees the devolution of powers as a redefinition of local government's role rather than a diminuation of powers.

Local Government has continually evolved from providing health and utility services to, for example, taking a leading role in driving up recycling rates to promotion and now enforcement in areas such as healthy living. I don't think it has anything to fear from these proposals. Indeed this is likely to be a rare opportunity for it as long as it recognises there are demands below it as well as rightly making demands itself to government.

I was a Councillor for 20 years and think the Councillor's role as a community champion has always been massively under funded in comparison to regulatory, executive and more recently scrutiny roles. I have no doubt Local Councillors, will take a leading role in any community initiatives such as sitting on the boards managing locally owned assets and expressing a view on any local ballots.

If there is any threat at all, it is to those remaining over centralised local authorities who have yet to disaggregate their budgetary spend and have resisted empowering Councillors in their community champion role!

[Charlie Mansell]

The full speech is now available at at:

http://www.communities.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1002882&PressNoticeID=2453

It has some good points to make on:

- Local Area Agreements
- Community ownership of assets
- Participatory budgets

It covers less on devolution to local government from central government, though my own view is LAA's will allow a flexible devolution to occur on an authority by authority basis.

However Gordon Brown's speech on Tuesday made reference to a clearer settlement between central and local government and so I think both speeches should be taken together as setting out a triple devolutionary process.

[PB]

There is lots more information about Participatory Budgeting at www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk

[Hannah]

The National Youth Agency is also looking at young people’s involvement in participatory budgeting and has published a research paper on the topic:
http://www.nya.org.uk/Templates/internal.asp?NodeID=95701