Open Budget
Description
The ‘Open Budget’ process allows local communities to have a say in how service providers allocate their funding.
How It Works – An Example
The Open Budget was used by Harrow Council to involve communities in deciding how its budget should be spent. There were two main parts to the Harrow Open Budget.
Firstly an Assembly was formed. This involved a large, day-long meeting of approximately 300 Harrow residents. Anyone in the community could apply to be part of the Assembly. The Council aimed to gather a demographically representative selection of local people at the event.
The 300 participants in the Assembly were seated in round tables of ten. Each table had an independent facilitator whose job was to make sure that everyone had an equal chance of being heard, and that all topics were covered.
Each table used networked computers to send the results of their deliberations to a central team. This team then identified the most common priorities emerging from the room. In Harrow's case, attendees were allocated to tables randomly to make sure there was a good mix of age, ethnic origin and geography. There were tables for different community languages, so that most people could speak in the language they were most comfortable with.
The participants at the Assembly were also responsible for electing an ‘Open Budget Panel’. This panel was set up to make sure that funding is used in the way that the Assembly agreed.
Potential Uses
This technique is particularly useful when you want to assess the priorities of a large and diverse group of people. It is also useful where a consensus has to be reached. It can be a simple way of involving non-specialists in decisions about budgets. This technique also provides insight into the priorities of certain demographic groups and provides a large pool of people to approach for future consultation events.
Resources Required
This is a fairly resource intensive technique. It requires a large number of independent facilitators (30 in this example), computers for each group, appropriate computer software and a team of analysts to evaluate the preferences indicated by each group. In Harrow, the initiative cost £200,000.
Further Information
Further information on this technique is available from Harrow Council.
