Open Government - public participation strategy: advice

Recommendation 5

Move away from year on year grants and develop sustainable funding streams

Recommendation 5 is strongly linked to recommendation 4 and 7. All experts highlighted the need to scale up mechanisms for community ‘investment’ as opposed to grants to provide stability in terms of funding and initiatives. Fiona Garven reflects, ‘What would be truly innovative would be to stick with a long term vision of how to build participation into the way we do public services in Scotland’ and to do this, long term funding is required. Services have been cut and the ability to organise across the public and voluntary sector has diminished due to staff restraints (Asenova and Stein 2014; Hastings et al. 2015).

A clear message is that investment in community facing roles, community development workers and groups who provide training and technical expertise is required. These vital roles help to coordinate and join communities with public sector partners, supporting communities to be effectively engaged in community development. Fiona Garven warns though, that these people should not necessarily be employed by the state.

Much of this depends on how funds are located. In the past they tend to all have been based around outcomes associated with particular policy areas, for instance regeneration outcomes or health outcomes, but Fiona says that support for the core of the community sector to grow and develop has not been funded and this is where we see gaping holes in service provision and inability to respond to need.

National government needs to avoid ‘dumping funding’ but it needs to be a conversation from the ground up about where and how funding is spent. Third sectors, local organisations, communities and local authorities have to be part of strategizing round where funding is allocated.

John Beaton too says that it is vital that public authorities engage in socially-responsible public procurement by buying ethical products and services, and by using public tenders to create job opportunities, decent work, social and professional inclusion and better conditions for disabled and disadvantaged people.

Action:

• Invest funds into community empowerment and employ community workers
• An ongoing governance review will help to identify how decision-making processes and powers can be devolved much more locally to be able to then respond to local need and the people who populate those local places
• A cross party agreement on long term plans for funding plans for health, climate stability and tackling poverty
• Ensure that funding results in job creation
• Pay those who take part in labour intensive participation and deliberative processes