You Decide!

You Decide! is the Tower Hamlets Partnership's innovative project designed to give local residents a say over how part of the local budget is spent.

What is it?

Participatory Budgeting is, at its most simple, involving local people in making decisions on the spending priorities of a defined budget.

The Tower Hamlets model

The Tower Hamlets model has grown out of the participation work already begun through the Local Area Partnerships (LAPs) and their Steering Groups. It has four stages:

1)    We develop menus of services that meet the priorities produced by the LAP for their local area. The wider menu of services is later approved by the cabinet ensuring that there is both local and council wide representative input throughout the process.

2)    We hold eight public You Decide! events. Each one is heavily advertised and hopefully attended by at least 100 local residents. This year the amount of attendees ranged from 69 to 127. Each event contains 3 elements:

Service information: The residents sit at tables and are given a brochure detailing all the services on offer and how much they cost. They then have the opportunity to further discuss the items on offer.

Deliberation: Each table of residents has a facilitator and is meant to represent a mix of the community. We give them a chance to discuss the options that have been presented and how they might benefit the community they live in. They don’t have to come to a consensus but it is important that they hear what their fellow residents think and why they think it.

Voting: We use ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ style quiz pads and the residents vote for the services they want. Each round of voting leads to the ‘purchase’ of one service and we keep going until all the money is spent. The results are displayed live as we go through the process.

3)    The LAP Steering Groups meet with the services to agree the details of the items they have purchased (such as where shrub beds will be located or how often the services will report to the Steering Group on how they are spending the local money). This process helps to embed the local ‘ownership’ of the projects.

4)    The Services are delivered. Members of the public and the Steering Group help monitor and shape the services by using a ‘community contract’. This contract is built into the process and reviewed at every stage. It sets out the responsibilities of the Steering Group, the residents and, importantly, the services.

'You Decide!' is based on the Brazilian model of Participatory Budgeting which was developed in the 1980s in city of Porto Alegre. At it's height in Porto Alegre over 15,000 people took part each year.

Subscribe | View Subscriptions