Participatory Budgeting or the people taking back control
Very few local councils in England allow their residents a say in how they spend their taxes. The Labour Party leadership has said nothing about a model of local democracy widely used in Europe and the Americas. Here is the history and here is how it empowers the people: the first in a 3 part The Prisma series.
With the two main UK parties so keen to talk about 'levelling-up' and empowering people to make the decisions that affect their lives you might think that people having a say in how local Councils spend their taxes would be top of the agenda and a constant issue in the mainstream press.
Since neither of the main parties have shown any interest in recent years and the press only sporadically, The Prisma feels a responsibility to inform our readers about a model that is widely used across the rest of Europe, as well as in the United States and South America where it was first developed. And even within the UK, it is Scotland and Northern Ireland and to a lesser extent Wales, where the topic is debated and implemented most widely. Only England lags behind with a few notable exceptions.
Taking back control is a degraded term since it was used to feed the fantasies of the Brexit campaign, so let's look at what it could actually mean if politicians dealt in facts and concerned themselves with the needs and sufferings of ordinary people today.
A history lesson from Latin America
A World Bank report in 2003 described the two principal benefits of PB (or Orçamento Participativo, OP in Portuguese), which began in 1989 in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre under the leadership of the Workers Party as improved social services such as water and sewerage, and more involvement of people - especially the poorer sectors - in decision making. Prior to that it was recognized that despite being relatively well off in Brazil, the city faced a large and growing inequality in which 30% of the urban population were living in poverty with poor access to health and educational services. After the success in Porto Alegre, it was soon adopted elsewhere in Brazil and Latin America, and in Europe Portugal is one of the countries with the highest rate of implementation of OP (later we shall hear from Nelson Dias about this).
In this period in Brazil some cities allocated very large percentages of their total spending through OP, reaching 30 - 50% in some places and achieving large increases in building social housing, schools and health provision. What is typical nowadays and in Europe is much less, but 5% of the budget, as happens in Paris, is still a very large amount of money. Although the World Bank report was 20 years ago, OP had been working for over a decade, so it has much to say about how it can be used effectively.
The process of discussion and decision making continues through most of the year, at local levels where there are discussions of specific local needs, of general principles, and in large public meetings. The importance of information, changing local government is a learning process at all levels inside and outside of the bureaucracy of local authorities and requires openness and patience. Inclusion increased rapidly, with local issues the focus in poorer areas, and larger principles of more importance in middle-class areas. Although OP was an initiative of the Workers Party (the PT) it included all citizens, which guaranteed that the proposed budgets would get passed.
Accountability and Transparency are essential to OP, and by eliminating the power of private interest lobbies the process is made credible. Citizen delegates are subject to sanctions if they don't perform correctly. At the same time citizens must be informed on the limits of the available budget to be divided up. Local media were often hostile to PB and published reports favouring privatization, this was successfully countered by local radio platforms, and by the commitment of activists.
PB in the UK
Having identified the issues, we can turn to the present day - and for this I spoke to Jez Hall who has been involved in PB since 2000 and currently directs PB partners, a project of Shared Future CIC, and also manages the PB Network website.
This article was first published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper on 26th June 2023 and can be read with the interview, links and photos here: https://theprisma.co.uk/2023/06/26/participatory-budgeting-or-the-people-taking-back-control/