Community Budgets and rocket science.

It will be interesting to see how the community budget pilots go.  For some reason Wiltshire was not selected.  This is a shame because the work we have been doing over the last four years has put us in a very strong position to deliver community budgets.  So, using our new powers of general competence we are going to get on and give it a go anyway.

As a concept, community budgeting is very simple.  The idea is to give local people more say over how their taxes are spent.  So, in developing our thinking we want to keep things as simple as we can. 

Our approach has six essential ingredients:

1.       Community areas:
It is important that geographies have validity and are based on a sense of belonging.  There must be a shared commitment across the public services to work conterminously.   In Wiltshire, community areas were identified by reference to geography, history, demographics and social patterns – see Dr John Chandler’s 1998 study A Sense of Belonging.  These geographies have endured for almost 15 years and are now the basis of unified service delivery within the County.   

2.       Community-led plans:
It is important that the views and aspirations of local people are at the heart of service design.  The community-led planning process in Wiltshire ensures that consultation, inclusion and public participation is the foundation stone upon which the community budget is built.  In Wiltshire, this process is developed and led by volunteers through independent community area partnerships. 

3.       Open data:
Provision of open data enables communities to identify priorities.  In Wiltshire, we have disaggregated JSA data to community area level and augmented this with public data from the other major service providers to create a local community profile.  This facilitates comparison across the County and highlights issues that might not be readily identified through consultative processes.

4.       Area based service plans:
We now requiring public services to produce area based costed operational plans that are agreed locally following consultation and negotiation.  This enables local communities to shape services around local priorities.  Wiltshire’s local highway plans show how this is emerging.

5.       Social Inclusion:
It is important that local budgets are not only influenced by the most articulate, organised and vociferous voices.  Empowering communities to control local services depends upon the engagement of all sections of the community.  Local authorities have a key role to play in ensuring that the process is truly inclusive.  In Wiltshire, this has involved the development of a new innovative narrative approach to social inclusion - Wiltshire Voices.  
  

6.       Democratic governance:
Locally elected councillors have a key role - through the effective operation of their community leadership role they facilitate and broker negotiations at local level.  This can only happen if effective local governance arrangements are in place.  In Wiltshire, we have 18 community area boards – coterminous with our community areas.    Area Boards have multi agency membership, they are inclusive, informal and participative – a long way from traditional local government committees.  These local governance arrangements increase democratic participation and public accountability.

 

I will let you know how this goes!