Pete Bevington

2 March, 2010

NORTH Lerwick is the only area outside Scotland’s central belt to be chosen in a government pilot on community development.

People living in North Staney Hill will be given the chance to vote on how to spend £20,000 in the neighbourhood in an X Factor-type contest.

The pilot is the government’s first foray into participatory budgeting, where residents choose how money is spent locally.

The Community Wellbeing Champions Initiative is being targeted at tackling anti social behaviour problems across the country’s inner city areas, and other pilots have been announced in Fife, Stirling, North and South Lanarkshire.

The Lerwick project has been chosen because it looks at preventing social problems before they happen by helping local people work together.

The North Staney Hill Community Association has been working hard over the past two years to reverse the area’s decline, helping to reopen the local shop, attract a mobile library and improve roads and pavements.

Association representatives will travel to Edinburgh this week to hear more about the pilot with SIC environmental health manager Maggie Dunne, who prepared the application from Shetland.

“No one knows much about participatory budgeting and this is the first time it’s ever been used in Scotland,” Ms Dunne said.

A public meeting will be held to inform the local community about how the pilot will work and invite people to come up with ideas about how the money should be spent. Then a public event will be arranged where each project will be judged. “It’s a bit like X Factor,” Ms Dunne said.

“We want to encourage people to come forward first of all with what their needs as individuals within the community are and ask them if they have ideas about how the money should be spent.”

The funding could be used as seed money to access other budgets, such as the lottery, she added.

Community association secretary John Bulter said: “It’s good to get the chance to bring some money into the area and we are looking forward to going out to the community with more information on this.”