The participatory budgeting process was first introduced in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It has been trialled in Tower Hamlets but is a first for Brent council which trialled a much smaller version of the initiative in January, with £500,000 of funding. In Brent town center on Tuesday night, the great hall was abuzz as almost 200 residents turned out to watch a Dragons’ Den-style event where each group or individual had three minutes to make a pitch for up to £50,000 in funding. The initiative, called You Decide, will allocate a budget of £400,000 to five sites across the borough, which includes Harlesden, Kilburn, Kingsbury and Kenton, Wembley and Willesden. “Giving people the chance to decide where money is actually spent on things they want to see in their communities is really empowering,” said council leader Muhammed Butt. The funding is divided into two pots: one is aimed at social and physical improvements. and a second aimed at supporting health and well-being in the region. In a series of public consultations, local residents are given the deciding power to vote on projects to receive funding through a voting system that ranks projects on a scale of one to five, a process overseen by an independent firm. More than 200 grant applications were submitted for the program. Tuesday’s selection round resulted in only 12 receiving funding. Among them was consultant dietitian Salma Mehar, 42, who plans to improve health inequalities in the township with a nutrition education program that aims to provide free nutritional resources to children with biodegradable plates and eco-friendly bamboo and cornstarch toothbrushes . both engraved with educational messages around nutrition and oral hygiene. “Children from lower socioeconomic communities generally tend to have worse health outcomes,” said Mehar, a mother of two. With nearly two-thirds of Brent’s population from Bame groups, much of its work has centered around these communities. “They are the ones who need more training,” he added. Brent is London’s most diverse borough, but 33% of its population live in poverty, which is significantly higher than the overall poverty rate in London. The north west London borough also has some of the highest rates of childhood obesity in London. During the first wave of coronavirus in June 2020, Brent had the highest age-standardised death rate from coronavirus in England and Wales. Excess deaths in the borough were three times the national average. “Now people are suddenly really interested in health inequalities in certain communities, but I’ve been seeing this for the last 20 years,” said Mehar, who promotes health and wellbeing in Bame communities in north-west London. for two decades. “There’s a question of paying for healthier food, healthier meals, healthier resources. Our aim is to promote and produce resources that will be free for these children and their families, but supported by a local council and government.” James Jordan, 32, and Jermaine Bishop, 37, also managed to secure funding for Set Them Up, a foundation which will teach financial literacy on topics such as mortgages, rents and pensions to students aged 15 to 18 years old. “We made some dumb mistakes when we were younger, when we got out of school, so we really try to emphasize safe use around money and credit,” Jordan said. Since April 2010, Brent council has been forced to cut its budget by £196m as the government funding it received fell by 78%. The municipality has transformed over the years as redevelopment efforts have transformed its urban spaces. Funding from the original scheme in January was taken from the carbon offset fund, which is formed from a charge paid by housebuilders who have not met the mayor of London’s carbon emissions target for their development. This fund was used for carbon reduction projects in Brent. Money from Tuesday’s participatory budget event comes from the neighborhood community infrastructure levy, a charge local councils apply to developers of houses and flats, which is redistributed to local communities. Whether this new participatory budgeting project will have a tangible impact remains to be seen. But at least for now, the power to change the area is temporarily in the hands of its residents, not just its council. “It’s democracy at the heart of the community,” Butt said.
