Involve: Balancing the books - your budget priorities (2011 consultation)

Balancing the books - your budget priorities (2011 consultation)

What we're doing

Working together with partners, Kirklees Council is committed to delivering effective public services - but we also need to make some tough financial choices and start to do things differently. We want to involve the public in the budget-setting process by looking at people's priorities for public services: what's most and least important to people? where do people want to protect spending? where do they want to make savings?

When we're doing it?

Between 10-Oct-2011 and 28-Dec-2011

We will be

Asking for information
Giving out/sharing information

Themes

Customer experiences

Where's it happening?

Across the whole of Kirklees:

More information on what we're doing

All Kirklees residents - as well as local businesses and voluntary or community groups - are invited to have a go at 'balancing the books' using the online budget tool (You Choose) available through the Kirklees website.

You can email your views on spending priorities to consultation@kirklees.gov.uk

A random selection of 35,000 households across Kirklees have also been sent the 'your place, your say' survey - this will give us a good cross-section of the views of different communities across the district. However, as this is such an important way to involve residents in shaping the way we plan services and spend our budget in the future we are, for the first time, inviting all residents to get involved by completing the online version of the survey.

Can anyone get involved?

Yes

What happened?

Feedback was summarised for consideration by budget decision makers in a series of 3 reports to provide a high level resident perspective on ‘balancing the books’.

Report 1 (see attached) summarised the key messages from our existing intelligence, including last year’s 'Your Voice' consultation.

Report 2 (completed mid December 2011) provided decision makers with an interim update on the findings of this year's consultation activity. Report 3 (completed early January 2012) was the final report on the findings - this report was included as part of the budget proposals info published on the council's website in mid-January (see attached link), along with further analysis to explore the differences in views between different communities of interest.

What difference did the work make?

The proposals to be considered by councillors for the budget, together with impact statements on these proposals and the consultation report providing a resident perspective, were made public at the 18th January Council meeting and then published on the council's website.

Cabinet considered the draft budget proposals on 7th February and proposed a number of amendments.

All councillors considered the budget proposals and amendments before making a final decision at the budget Council meeting on 22nd February 2012. (This meeting was webcast). The three main parties agreed a budget for providing local services over the next three years.

Methods of involvement

Method	How	How many people	Start	End
Online	You Choose online budget tool	As many as possible	28-10-2011	28-12-2011
Online	'Your place, your say' survey (open access)	As many as possible	10-10-2011	25-11-2011
Paper copy	'Your place, your say' survey (core sample)	35,000	10-10-2011	25-11-2011

Contact details

Name

Alison Monkhouse

Telephone

01484 221000

alison.monkhouse@kirklees.gov.uk

Documents and links

Report 1 - summary of existing intelligence (pdf 841Kb)

Part of an organisation that's signed up to the Framework?

Project summary