This is very interesting. Would CRC/PBU consider a Parish/Town Council in Herefordshire as part of the pilot? Please. Anthony Bush

Thanks Anthony, I will pass your comments and details on to the team.

Toddington (Beds) Parish Council  is about to embark on a three year cycle of PB. Each April/May it will report to its voters at the Annual Assembly on its financial statements for the financial year ending on the previous 31 March, it will present the budget for the current financial year and it will outline future plans for the following financial years with a view to receiving comments, additions and ammendments. Jim Gledhill (Chairman)

Thanks Jim, I'm sure the team would be interested to hear more, if you wanted to email more details to us.

Toddington Parish Council [Bedfordshire] is about to embark on a three year rolling programme of PB. At the annual meeting of parishioners eld each April the council will report on the financial outturn for the previous year, present the budget for the current year and submit its proposals for activity and expenditure for the following financial year. It will welcome comments and suggestions from residents at each stage, particularly the last one where it would hope to see ammendments, additions etc.

The leaflet does not refer to Parish Plans which should provide the basis for a community led, costed and prioritised action plan which in turn informs the budget process for the parish council. Ongoing review, feedback and tweaking of these parish plan priorities is necesary for such a living document, and this process itself mounts to participatory budgeting. Please don't suggest that we are going to sideline the Parish Plan initiative which was the best of the RWP 2000 for the parish/town council sector. Instead I suggest we should be investing in the Parish Plan process as a major community led tool for participator budgeting. I realise that not all communities will have a Parish or Neighbourhood Plan; they may need support to develop one but they - and funding -should not be diverted to a watered down version. Let's have some joining up, please!

Thanks for your comment. I'll pass it to the team and ask them to respond as to how Parish Plans fit in.

Laura Jacobs, Head of our Rural Governance team, has kindly provided a response:

Parish or community led plans are a very important and valuable way for local people to create a vision for their community and an action plan to achieve it. The process involves using a mix of evidence collection, different types of consultation and debate at the very local neighbourhood level.

It is designed to be a process in which each and every citizen can participate and results in very high levels of participation. There is a new website that brings together the information on community led planning and can be found at www.acre.org.uk/communityledplanning

Participatory Budgeting is another tool for enabling local engagement in decision making and has been specifically identified by government as a tool that it wishes to see every Local Authority using by 2010. PB is about giving people a direct say and opportunity to decide how public money is spent.

It could be that a PB process could naturally follow a community led plan by giving citizens the opportunity to prioritise how public money is spent to achieve the ambitions of the plan. We are looking to see how PB can be applied to the decisions on spending the parish precept, and this may include how to prioritise the actions from the community led parish plan

Notwithstanding that your response appears to be cut off in midstream, my concerns are rather confirmed by it in two fundamental areas of parish council budget planning, where you seem to be oblivious to the following good practice promoted in the defra Good Councillor's Guide for someyears: Firstly that the focus should be on the budget rather than the precept as the latter is only one element of income in the policy-budget-precept forward planning principle. Secondly, that you seem to be looking at  parish plans as an after-thought in the whole PB process. I assure you that PP action plans do indeed prioritise community led proposals. Those of us involved in p&tc training have been preaching PB for years - albeit without a fancy name - and many p&tcs have been applying the process. I am left wondering, as usual, whether there has been any liaison with p&tc practitioners and trainers on the ground. Your words "It could be that a PB process could naturally follow a community led plan ...." are very worrying.

I sense a call for some stability of both process and nomenclature.  The RWP 2000 offered Vital Villages (Parish Planning) and Market Town Initiative Healthchecks.  Both programmes were pursued vigorously and - generally - to good effect.  Community-led planning is, at best, a development of these common sense approaches, at worst wheel renivention/renaming.  By all means develop approaches (that's essential) but please try not to confuse the people who live in the towns and villages.  Remember they are usually volunteers, and the work  they do locally takes their time and effort.  It's a long old slog (never ending really) and, to finish where I started, I think they might welcome a degree of stability, no more name changes, and steady support.  This will possibly be quite boring for programme developers because the apporach will be around for ages - gulp! it won't be 'innovative' - but it will, I suspect, be wlecomed,   Good luck!

There are a variety of tools that engage communities in decision making, that have developed and flexed in their approach, and indeed their names, over the space of a number of years. They are all valuable tools.

As the government’s rural adviser, we have a clear role in advising on how the ambitions of the recent white paper, Communities in Control, which brought PB to the fore as a government commitment, can be delivered in rural areas. As such we are working with the PBU to do this within the new context and with the new commitment that government has shown to the process. At the CRC, we welcome this new commitment.

Laura Jacobs, Head of Active and Inclusive Representation and Decision-Making team