Neighbourhood Budget

Queen’s Park is one of thirteen areas in the country to be piloting the Neighbourhood Community Budget. NCB is a government sponsored programme designed to involve service users and volunteers in the redesign of local services.  The purpose of the scheme is to prove that working this way can lead to better and more efficient services.  In Queen’s Park the focus of this work will be on early intervention and prevention in the Early Years.

What’s the story?:

  • Following mounting gang related activity in Queen’s Park between 2009 and 2010 Development Trust (DT) secures funding to employ an outreach service to divert young men at risk of getting into gangs and raises concerns with the police, City Council (CC) and other local agencies. Cabinet Member for Crime and Community Safety chairs a multi-agency round-table meeting in Queen’s Park focussing on prevention through whole systems working.
  • More agencies join the ‘Virtual Mozart’ group giving rise to need for dedicated coordination.
  • DT applies on behalf of the ‘Virtual Mozart’ group to the Government’s Departement for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) for pilot status to become one of a handful of neighbourhoods in the country to be supported to trail blaze a neighbourhood approach to redesigning local services from a local user perspective. The government programme is called Neighbourhood Community Budgets and complements the more established Whole Place Community Budget known locally as “Tri-borough”.
  • A resident from the Community Council Campaign group together with PDT CEO and Queen’s Park Forum staff and Assistant CEO of WCC are invited to present the bid to DCLG. The pitch is successful.

What has happened:

  • A series of pre-meetings of local residents and service providers was held to introduce the concept of NCB and to begin the process of refining what exactly we would be able to achieve through a 12 month pilot.
  • The bid puts residents at the heart of shaping local services, and builds on the emerging role of the Queen’s Park Community Council to hold service providers to account, as well as to marshal voluntary action to an agreed shared purpose for the good of the whole community.
  • The NCB plan was clear that residents should be given a role in deciding exactly what service they wanted to apply the NCB approach to – the only stipulation being that the service should be an early intervention and preventative service targeting children and/or young people and their families – a criteria which had its roots in nearly two years of pre-planning and community action.
  • Working groups were created to map these services so we could see what we were being asked to choose from
  • Meetings were held with all major service providers in the early years to scope options and compare and align agendas.