Duncan, really useful link, thanks. There’s one para in there I wish i’d written myself. I may take this up in another post.

Charlie, I like participatory budgeting too as it is a genuinely empowering experience (I did some of it in my work overseas) but that;s hugely different from personalised budgeting, I think we agree. I’ve actually put forward a pilot for Participatory Budgeting to my council, having been awarded a few thousand quid from somone or other to run it as an action research project, but the council is still mulling over whether it can accept this grant money. Will report back on this

Alex, thanks for dropping in. Rwally like your blog, first pushed my way by Dave at Though Cowards Flinch. Sorry not to have commented at your place – result of some IT technical issues to do with the council based server i use,. as well as laziness.

In fact you win gold medal for thought provking comments – a study of the relationship between the ‘ideas’ that apparently drive NL to do what they do and the ‘operationla code’ they then maintain is much needed as we move to this new post-crappy-communitarianism age. Will think on, and maybe blog

I’ve always been taken by what Tony Benn said about working people using the ballot to collectively purchase that which they cannot individually – that collectively we have a bargaining power over institutions.

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/06/social-liberalism-reeves

It is therefore, um, disconcerting that one of the claims that Reeves and Collins make about personalised budgets in one of their pamphlets is that PB costs less overall because individuals know what is best for themselves and so pick cheaper options than those given them by bureaucrats(!)

So we’re not even at the level of implementation questions such as ‘what happens to the services which only a few people want to use which will become incredibly expensive to provide’ or ‘what happens when everyone wants to use some of their budget on a place at the local community theatre which can only take five people’, but instead dealing with people who are pushing a policy which they know absolutely nothing about.

Yup, the experience I’ve had with personalised budgets to date simply confirms what the ‘choose and book’ system introduced in the NHS showed – in general people would prefer a universal service-without-fuss, and only the ‘pushy parents’ of the type Liam Byrne refers to are in a position to use the system as it is theoretically laid out.

A personalised system for all welfare will become, all too quickly, a test as to why an individual deserves support, or more often, why they do not. As with the implementation of the Welfare Reform Bill, of course.

I accept that Liam Byrne’s motives may be good, and it is good to see him acknowledge institutional constraints on individual freedom, but as ever the detail is in the implementation.

The Progress article is especially bad. They are really pushing this idea of personalised budgets as the flagship of “liberal republicanism”, without (it seems) any idea of how these actually work or what the problems with them are.