Climate Emergency Manchester has released a brief guide on how Manchester City Council’s budget process works.
The two page guide is free to download (here as a pdf, here as a word doc) and will help people understand what is at stake at today’s virtual meeting of Manchester City Council’s Executive (webcast link here – CEM will be livetweeting until it loses the will to live (probably about ten minutes in. See @climateemergmcr will use the all-purpose hashtag #mcrdemocracy) .
The guide’s author, Marc Hudson from Climate Emergency Manchester said
“The Council does a shocking job of explaining how it decides to spend the money that it gets from business rates, grants, council tax and its part-ownership of the Airport. Our guide, written in plain English, will help people who live in Manchester understand more about what is going on. In the coming months, crucial decisions are going to be made about the post-coronavirus world, and we want to help people shape those decisions for social and ecological fairness and sanity. We have to bounce forward, not back.”
Yesterday it was revealed that the Council is throwing yet another ten million pounds at the money pit which is “the Factory”
The budget guide is one very small part of a much larger project, known as the Active Citizenship Toolkit. CEM has decided that it needs to operate at ‘expert’ level on Council budgets, and currently is only at novice level (on a good day, practitioner level).
Climate Emergency Manchester will produce further guides, and work with individuals and groups in Manchester to keep tabs on how budget decisions are made over the coming months.
Another great piece of work – thank you CEM.