North Ayrshire
Project name: North Ayrshire Community Choices
Last updated
Project name: North Ayrshire Community Choices
Last updated
North Ayrshire is one of the 32 Council Areas of Scotland, being the 'third' layer of government besides the UK government and the Scottish country government. North Ayrshire is situated in the South-West of Scotland. It is made up of many medium-sized towns, quite a big rural population and a few island communities like the Great Cumbrae and the Isle of Arran.
Several social-economic and political conditions make the work of council officials quite challenging. North Ayrshire has the second highest child poverty rate in Scotland, and forty percent of its population live in the most deprived neighborhoods in the country. And on top of that come problems of political disempowerment of marginalized communities, the lack of engagement in political processes and distrust of local authorities.
Laura Taylor of the North Ayrshire Council Area and John Munro of local government association, are exploring how participatory budgeting through the CONSUL DEMOCRACY platform, can contribute to shifting some of these trends.
Start with CONSUL
Participatory democracy has been an active topic of public conversation in North Ayrshire from around 2013 and as such has been running for a long time. Much of the participation, though, has been done in face-to-face settings using in-person methods.
This changed when COVID-19 came along and Taylor and her colleagues had to find ways of continuing PB through different, digital methods.
CONSUL had been around for a bit around that time (2021/2022), but it was never received well among North Ayrshire's communities, for various reasons. One of those, according to Munro, was that it was offered as a fixed solution as opposed to a flexible solution that is adjustable to the local context and to people's preferences. At that time there weren't many people in the Council with a technical background who would be able to understand this and make these adjustments.
The login challenge
One of the adjustments that Munro has done has to do with logging into the North Ayrshire Community Choices platform. Cosla as added a Single sign-up through an integration with the mygov.scot national ID mechanism. While this is strategically the right thing to do, North Ayrshire hadn't made much use of the mygov.scot login yet, and creating an account and resetting passwords turned out to be difficult for many people. The result was that people started complaining about it to senior council officials and to local politicians.
One of the key lessons from North Ayrshire is that when issues occur, technical support needs to be able to respond quickly to help the council run a successful process. In this case Munro activated the 'regular' sign-up through CONSUL using a user name and an active e-mail address.
Currently there are a number of sign-up options on the North Ayrshire Community Choices platform: a local sign-up for the platform, the mygov.scot sign-up mechanism, Facebook and Google social logins and the Young Scot card (a National Entitlement Card). In addition to those self service methods, a script has been developed which creates prepopulated usernames and passwords which can be distributed to people who either cant or won't create their own login.
The integration between mygov.scot and CONSUL works very well in many Scottish Council Areas such as Edinburgh, but in others, like North Ayrshire, people don't like using it very much, especially people in the hard to reach populations. The resulting lesson for Taylor and Munro is that even if you do want to do the right thing strategically, sometimes you just need to change and do what people need you to do so that they can participate.
A related tension exists between, on one hand, doing good enough verification to check whether the people are entitled to participate, and, on the other hand, making it easy and safe for people to actually login and participate. In North Ayrshire this tension was resolved in favor of the latter and skip verification altogether and just allow anyone who want to participate to be able to do so.
PB vs. democracy
A weakness of the PB process in North Ayrshire is that it's mostly viewed as grant funding, not necessarily as a democratic exercise of collective decision-making. It's a funding cycle that happens every year where they get 1000 pounds for their project. According to Taylor it is important to make PB more about decision making again and mainstream that perspective, but that currently in the Council his is a hard sell both internally and politically.
An example of very successful PB cycle, however, was a PB process around redesigning green spaces, but this was pre-COVID and in a different financial context.
Overall, though the amount the amount of public money that was spent through some type of participatory process in Scotland (of which CONSUL-powered digital participation is a small part) is significant: 500 million pounds.
Geozone bending
Two PB projects are recurring annually in North Ayrshire: the Locality PB and the Youth PB. The Locality PB is about projects in a 'locality', a local area, of which there are six in North Ayrshire. In Scotland these administrative divisions are implemented through the so-called Locality Partnership model, which is about communities coming together to make decisions.
The Youth PB is just for projects that impact young people. For this it is important that Taylor and Munro work together to make sure that adults can't participate and vote on projects in the PB process. Last year they adjusted the CONSUL code to restrict user permissions using the geozone feature (as these restrictions are possible throughout the platform but PB). Munro put all the accounts of young people on the platform in geozone X and then created the script that only people from that geozone could take part in the Youth PB heading on the platform.
Youth voice
North Ayrshire is officially a child and youth centered Council Area with quite some acitivity centered around supporting and hearing the voices of young people. There are several youth voice structures like a youth executive board, youth assemblies in schools as well as a youth parliament in Scotland including respresentatives from North Ayrshire too. These are efforts to make young Scots engage early on and make them active participants in democracy, and avoid political disengagement which is fairly common among older generations.
Other mechanism are internal, like the Joint Cabinet, where 120 youth from North Ayrshire schools come together with senior leadership and senior elected officials of the council and discuss ideas and ask questions directly to the people in power.
Projects funded in the Youth PB are projects for local youth initiatives or events, but also migrant youth from Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine are increasingly present in the PB process. These young 'new Scots' have been applying for activities that they might not have been able to do without PB money.
CONSUL pro's
Taylor and Munro explain that a good thing about using CONSUL has been that it forced a clear work flow onto Council officials. There are nine PB phases, you can switch on and off phases that you want or don't want to use, and you get to do them in a certain order. Within this structure, there is a degree of flexibility as to how to configure and 'fill' the different phases.
Using CONSUL also improved the PB process for North Ayrshire from a data perspective. Earlier the Council used extensive questionnaires for PB project applications, consisting of more than 30 questions, mandatory for proceeding to the next phase. Many people couldn't answer all of it due to lack of resources, skills, illiteracy, etc. The setup of CONSUL helped to take a step back and ask: what do we need from people to be able to run the process, and what don't we need (especially in a first phase where half of the project applications don't make it through)?
An added advantage was that this was also good from a data perspective and complying with GDPR requirements because limits on required data for participants also applied to personal data.
In Scotland the stipulates that the Council Areas have to spend one percent of their combined annual budgets through PB. While in Scotland nationally this target is being hit, in North Ayrshire there has been a downward trend in the funds being spent through PB. The main reason for this is limited general public budgets in the Council Area (and in other Scottish Council Areas).
Connected to this, remarks Taylor, is the desire to add a tool to the CONSUL platform that can translate the site into other languages to remove English as a barrier to participation for refugee communities. (This could be one of the features to be developed as part of the project, ed. april 2025).
