Planned activity continued to be impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and although not as severe as 2020/21 it still required Officers to redeploy their focus on recovery out of the pandemic.

Participatory Budgeting awareness was the main focus during 2021/22 with discussions taking place with various Heads of Service to identify potential opportunities and these will be developed into PB exercises in 2022/23.

Starting from a low base of funding allocated by PB in 2020/21 made it difficult to scale up quickly to the full target in 2021/22 and the amount of work to support a quality exercise was considerable for the small team involved.

However, having a live local example – and one which delivered a good quality outcome in terms of funds leveraged in and satisfaction with the result from the local community – has greatly assisted in enabling officers to envisage how PB could be used within their services in future.

We are a medium sized council and service budgets are small, therefore to achieve a 1% mainstream PB and to embed this into service delivery will require several different strands.

To ensure PB is delivered successfully, a decision to work with Roads colleauges on a £500,000 budget in the first year on a PB approach for our Active Travel will allow the process to be set up and trialed and all issues smoothed out for future years.

Although the framework target was achieved in 21/22, there are significant challenges ahead in terms of planning for PB, as the Council addresses its projected budget gap.

Reprioritisation of activity, including suspension of most deliberative community engagement, due to impacts of the pandemic. Going forward, while a number of areas of potential interest are being examined as set out in 4a), identifying sufficient staffing resource to maintain a pipeline of qualifying projects to the values required is likely to be challenging.

We are only recently in a position post-Covid
where we are able to get back out into
communities but hope to keep building on that
going forward.
Staff capacity continues to be a challenge, as it
is recognised that PB is a resource intensive
process if it is to be done effectively.
An internal PB network has been set up to
facilitate sharing of information / best practice
between staff with experience of PB, and those
who plan to undertake a future process.

There have been several challenges that have hindered our ability to meet the 1% target in 2021/22, not least the arrival of the Omicron variant last Winter and laterally the Ukrainian war that started in February.

Similar to last year, services across the Council were having to undertake business as usual and on-going pandemic response and recovery work for much of the financial year, with resources then being rerouted to responding to the refugee crisis at the end of the year. This work is reactive and often deadline driven. This presented real challenges in re-introducing and embedding a culture of community engagement and empowerment – as these take planning, time and commitment when resources are already stretched.

Due to the pandemic and COVID restrictions prosposals to develop new PB opportunities were paused as Communities staff and other Council resources were directed to work on urgent frontline COVID response to support people affected by C19. Discussions with Council departments have restarted to develop a PB approach to allocating their budgets and agreeing local priorities for future years e.g. Roads and Amenities/Landscape & Countryside.