Pot of gold

Local authorities can show they are serious about getting people involved in local democracy by allowing residents to decide how council cash is spent, writes Cllr Neil Parkin

Adur district council’s ‘Pot of gold’ project was its first participatory budgeting consultation exercise, complete with an interactive event for residents.

 My colleagues and I wanted to get our residents involved, and to give them some real influence in what council taxpayers money is spent on. We also decided this would replace the traditional budget consultation, which, frankly, never gets a great response.

To show how serious we were, we put up 10% of our capital budget – an initial £100,000. We then decided to add to this with another £20,000 from our capacity reserves. This additional money would pay for some smaller projects in the community.

We invited community groups, charities, voluntary organisations and residents to put forward their ideas for projects that would benefit local people and the district. And - ambitious for a council, I know – we wanted to make it as exciting as possible to get people interested.

 Studio audience

The application process was kept simple to encourage people to apply. We split the categories into a large pot (up to £30,000) and small pot (up to £10,000). We received 39 applications, for both pots, and these were shortlisted down to 14 ready for the big ‘Pot of gold’ event held last month.

On the ‘Pot of gold’ night, we used ‘ask the audience’ technology – and this gave the event a real buzz. A studio audience (pictured) made up of local residents voted live for their favourite projects, following short presentations from the shortlisted groups. We even had our own judges (also known as the council cabinet) to ask questions about the applications. And as leader of the council, I suppose you could say I did my Simon Cowell bit, but a lot nicer.

The variety of applications we received surprised councillors, and this was one of the most impressive outcomes of the ‘Pot of gold’. Many of the successful projects would have struggled to be eligible to find funding from other sources.

To give you an idea of the variety of the projects, here is a sample of the winners in the £30,000 pot:

• new toilets for a community centre;
• new flooring, shop front and disabled access for a charity that sells second-hand furniture;
• a BT landline for the National Coastwatch (staff currently rely on their personal mobiles to contact the emergency services);
• improvements to a local beach – the council is going to take on this project, working with local residents.

Some of the smaller projects were just as varied, and included a residents’ association planning to turn a piece of wasteland into a wildlife garden, new BMX ramps for teenagers, and a flat screen TV and DVDs for a charity that offers respite care to children with special needs.

We will definitely put money into another ‘Pot of gold’ in the next financial year. I’m not sure how much will be available yet.

Lessons have been learnt and we would make some changes: one of these would be to not hold the event in January. We had unusual snowfall and the weather was atrocious, so we were lucky to get as many people to come along as we did.

But overall, Adur’s ‘Pot of gold’ proved to be a real success with community groups and our residents, and showed people that we are a council which is serious about getting local people involved in local democracy.

• Cllr Neil Parkin is leader of Adur council