Your Hands – user generated democracy
It’d be easy to be cynical about a project like ‘In Your Hands’. An X factor style series of presentations (I counted 26 in all) from a range of community projects competing for a slice of the twenty grand put up by Lancaster City Council. But missing from this event was Simon Cowell (Hoorah!) and his auspicious panel of show biz mates sprinkling magic dust on those they feel they’d make most money out of by signing them to their record labels. No, the judges at ‘Your Hands’ were all drawn from the great British public – or more accurately Poulton in Lancashire. There was no panel of self anointed experts or even publicly elected officials. Just plain old (and young) members of the community who decide among themselves which projects they feel will bring most benefit to people in Poulton. Participatory budgeting is a relatively new phenomenon in the UK. Basically it’s a mechanism of local government, which brings local communities closer to the decision-making process around the public budget. The people meeting Morecambe’s Platform this afternoon were less interested in the roots of participatory budgeting. They were there to find out which ideas their friends and neighbours would vote for to win a slice of £20k. Clearly there would be winners and losers. The interesting thing was – that didn’t really seem to matter. The Morecambe and District Anglers were just as interested to learn about their local sailing club who were equally interested to discover there was a community group called Foyer who provided accommodation for 16 year olds and gave them a shot at independence. All were fascinated by each others bids. £2000 to buy an allotment were teenagers could grow their own veg. A slush fund for the a credit union providing cash form school uniforms. A new PA for the local footlights theatre. Railway track for the model railway club. The list goes on.
At the heart of the system is the voting. Everybody living in Poulton who turns up on the day is eligible to vote. They don’t just vote for their ‘top 3′ ideas. Instead, they sit through everybodys presentations and score them from 1 – 10. Surely such a crude ballot is open to abuse. Any group with a decent membership could so easily tip the scales by tuning up en-masse and voting. Apparently not. Jez Hall of Church Action on Poverty’s Participatory Budgeting unit says that never happens. ‘PB events have tended to bring out peoples altruism rather than peoples greed.’ That was evident today. Would a larger sum of money change things. Hall says not. At the spiritual home of PB, Porto Alegre in Brazil, the local government spends millions of pounds this way.
The question now must be whether local councils in the UK are prepared to take that risk and devolve more of the decision making process to the people who pay their wages and live in the communities they serve.
