By Susan Aitken

What difference could £1 million of investment make to your local community? If you were given the opportunity to decide how that money should be spent, what choices would you make?

At the last meeting of Glasgow City Council, the SNP group proposed a motion to allow local people to make their decisions about how to spend resources on that scale, through the allocation of one per cent of the council’s budget to locally-based community budgeting. It was voted down by the Labour administration but, if the SNP is elected to form a new city government in Glasgow next year, we’ll make it a priority to put that £1m out to strengthened and expanded local partnership structures in every council ward. We’ll also ensure that the vast majority of decisions about planning and licensing issues (ridiculously centralised in Glasgow) will be taken in the places affected by them. This will be potentially transformative spending and decision-making power, devolved to communities and giving local people the ability to effect change where they live.

Recent Community Choices budgeting pilots in the city (with much smaller budgets, jointly provided by the Scottish Government and area partnerships) gave a hint of what can be achieved by giving local people choices about how resources are used in their communities. This method of empowering citizens has delivered successful outcomes elsewhere. In the city of Porto Alegre in Brazil, where participatory budgeting was pioneered some 20 years ago, people have voted on how to spend more than $700m in their communities, investing in local infrastructure improvements that have raised the quality of life for everyone.

In Brazil, community budgeting voting events attract thousands of people, feature samba bands and other entertainment and have become as much a part of Brazilian life as football or going to the beach. Why shouldn’t our city aspire to a Glaswegian version radical local decision-making?

This is not about abdicating our responsibilities as elected members and service providers and it won’t insulate Glasgow or any other local authority from tough spending decisions. But those tough decisions make it even more important that the council works with individuals and communities to understand their needs: the Christie Commission recognised in 2011 that shared decision-making with communities was the best way to maximise the benefits we can gain from scarce resources; that’s no less true now.

The days of top-down decision making should be over. It won’t be a magic bullet but, with the right local structures in place and the right support behind them, communities, working in partnership with councillors and council officers, will make informed decisions confidently.

The longer term prize will be to restore to the people of our city a sense of control over their neighbourhoods and, by extension, their and their families’ lives. The work of the Glasgow Centre for Population Health and Sir Harry Burns, among others, have provided compelling evidence that the physical and psychological stress caused to people and communities when they believe they have little power to shape their destinies is cutting the lives of too many of our citizens short. It is a pernicious additional factor that combines with the conditions of poverty and economic inequality to halt human potential in its tracks. Telling people what’s good for them isn’t good for them.

The time has come to tackle head on that sense of powerlessness and the only way to start is to hand power right over and put our citizens in charge. It’s not good enough to keep saying that communities "aren’t ready" to take on significant spending decisions. If we keep saying that, they’ll never have the opportunity to be ready. For what it’s worth, I think Glaswegians are more than ready; it’s up to us as elected members to give them the chance.

Municipal paternalism may have had its place and time but that was over long ago. Let’s bid it a final and not-so-fond farewell and start a community empowerment revolution for Glasgow: a new era of democratic engagement and citizens in control.

Susan Aitken is leader of the SNP group on Glasgow City Council.