Budget planning as we know it is changing. It still means looking into what can be allocated where and often making hard trade-offs. But, with shifting financial settlements and a three-year financial plan, it’s important to remember: the planning cycle begins with understanding residents.
Resident engagement isn't just a final check on decisions that have already been made. Done well, it helps councils understand local priorities, shape the direction of the budget and prepare residents for the trade-offs ahead.
Budget season is an engagement moment
Autumn is when councils start turning broad financial priorities into choices that will shape the final budget. In reality, budgets are fluid and the impacts of individual proposals, questions, and insights may not even be clear enough to consult on yet. But, that's why engagement matters so much at this stage. Before the specifics are set, councils have an opportunity to understand what matters to residents, what they need, and how to prioritise the decisions yet to come.
But, the reality of how we answer residents has shifted. With the move from one year patches to three-years plans, new expectations on how funding is tied to local needs, and the always present pressures of reality, it's no longer an option to think of engagement as a communications support slapped on to a decision that's already been made.
Getting engagement for budgets isn't as simple as just asking residents to choose between competing options. Budget consultations are as much about education as they are about choices. On the Go Vocal platform, budget consultations have the highest average participation of the consultation types measured, at 318 participants per consultation. But, turnout alone doesn't make a consultation successful. Do residents have enough information to understand the choices being made? As a council, are you genuinely listening and using that information?
Yet, an uncomfortable truth remains: in many councils, engagement is a team of one, treated as a comms function, and first in line when savings are found. But, if we want decisions to stick, engagement from residents needs to act as a core part of making those defensible decisions in the first place.
What makes this autumn different?
Three-Year Certainty: For the first time since 2016, the central government is giving councils more certainty regarding their funding across a three year period, covering 2026/27 to 2028/29. Local authorities will still make and consult on their annual budgets, but the decisions behind those budgets will need to be shaped around a longer-term picture. This makes it even more important to understand the priorities and needs of residents earlier in the process while there's still room to shape what's coming next.
Fair Funding Review 2.0: These decisions are also tied to resident needs. The Fair Funding Review 2.0 consultation as laid out by the UK government, marks the next step in how funding will be allocated across councils. This means the question of “what do these residents actually need?” is now an evidence based, measurable budget question that councils will be judged on.
The Pressure Reality: Of course, it's not all new money and easy choices. Even with increased funding for some councils, demand in social care, SEND, and homelessness means many councils will still be asking residents to engage with difficult trade-offs and savings. This means the way councils frame those choices is just as important as the choices themselves.
Neighbourhood-level funding, including Pride in Place: Beyond core budgets, we are also seeing neighbourhood-level funding models taking shape. Take the Pride in Place programme. Boards confirmed their membership to MHCLG in July 2026 and owe a resident-backed Neighbourhood Plan by November to unlock up to £20m per neighbourhood over ten years. While just one funding stream across 284 neighbourhoods, it serves as the sharpest illustration of how resident-led allocation is becoming the norm.
And whether you are navigating these interesting changes on the horizon, multi-million-pound neighbourhood grants or making tough choices on social care, it's becoming increasingly clear that engagement is not just a nice-to-have. It's a critical job.
Engagement is a critical job
It is a legal duty with teeth: A budget consultation isn't simply an opportunity to collect opinions. There are rules around how councils consult, including consulting before decisions are made and demonstrating that responses have been conscientiously considered.
Consultation in the UK is governed by the Gunning principles: consult before the decision is made, give enough information in accessible language, allow adequate time to respond, and conscientiously consider the responses. Fail them, and the consultation can be judicially reviewed and the decision quashed.
Shape vs substance matters: Take the 2018 Bristol City Council SEND case. By burying £5m of SEND cuts within a wider "shape of the budget" consultation, the specific impact on affected families wasn't clear. Because the council obscured the substance of the cuts, residents couldn't give "intelligent consideration" to the proposals. The council failed the second Gunning principle (Gunning 2), and the decision was quashed.
Getting consultation wrong is more expensive than getting it right: A consultation that gets challenged can cost far more than getting the process right in the first place. There are legal fees and officer time to consider, as well as the work involved if a consultation needs to be run again. The Bristol SEND case shows why getting the details right matters. If residents don't have enough information to understand the impact of a proposal, they can't give meaningful responses to it.
The funding regime now demands evidence of local need: Without resident input, understanding local needs becomes much harder to evidence. Engagement is how that evidence gets produced. What councils choose to ask about and what residents actually want to talk about aren't always the same thing.
Looking at a sample of 49 UK councils currently running live consultations on Go Vocal, the top five topics residents actively raise are Safety, Public spaces & buildings, Community development, Health & welfare, and Social inclusion. Across the Go Vocal platform, councils framed 504 consultations around housing, but it only drew 266 submissions. Meanwhile, residents raised safety most often (1,404 submissions), even though it was rarely the primary framing of the consultation. Engagement helps bridge that gap.
It is how three-year plans survive contact with residents: Multi-year certainty is only useful if the plan actually holds for three years. A three-year plan only survives elections, leadership changes, and local opposition if the residents helped build it. If you're asking residents to live with the consequences of a three-year financial plan, they need to have had a role in shaping it.
Understanding why engagement matters is one thing, but executing it effectively under pressure is another. So, what does a successful (and unsuccessful) budget consultation actually look like in practice?
How to run a budget consultation well
What can go wrong:
As previously seen, sometimes there's a disconnect with councils asking about topics residents aren't focused on, or failing to account for changes like three-year planning. But consultations can also fail on a tactical level:
- Seeing your platform as single use — An engagement platform is a standing budget line, not a per-project cost. Councils that fund it once run every consultation on it, all year, including next year's budget.
- Failing to meet your residents where they're at — Dropping 50 pages of difficult to understand financial documents. If they can't understand them, residents can't engage with them.
- Consulting too late or not completely — Asking for feedback on a financial decision leadership has effectively already made, or not providing sufficient information for residents to consult on.
What good looks like:
Let's look at the London Borough of Newham. They run their Draft 2026 Budget consultation on the same platform as their neighbourhood-level “People Powered” participatory budgeting programme.
Because they treat their engagement platform as permanent infrastructure rather than a single-use tool, their engagement metrics have soared. Across their participatory budgeting cycles, engagement grew from 3,147 residents (2018–20) to 16,552 (2021–23), with £1.6m invested and 157 projects funded. Most importantly, 89% of residents felt more connected to their area, and 84% felt involved in decision-making.
Newham succeeds because they treat the platform as permanent infrastructure. This is what it looks like when engagement infrastructure isn't treated as something you buy for one consultation.
When residents are being asked to weigh up competing priorities rather than simply choose what they like, traditional consultation formats may not be enough. Approaches such as Common Ground can help residents explore where they agree, where they differ and what trade-offs they are prepared to make.
What officers should have ready before the consultation opens:
Before heading out with decisions, officers should already have a base level understanding of what residents want, need, and are frustrated about. For example, recent LGA polling showed road maintenance and potholes consistently trigger the highest national dissatisfaction.
If residents are furious about potholes, but your consultation ignores highways spending or fails to explain why funds must legally go to statutory care instead, it will invite backlash. Have three things ready:
- Baseline context: Know local pain points so you can address them proactively.
- Honest trade-offs: Ask clear questions ("If we protect X, we must cut Y. What do you support?").
- Accessible summaries: Translate financial realities into plain English.
The platform is council infrastructure
Throughout this blog, we've established the importance of engagement in budget planning. Because, as we showed, engagement is a legal requirement, a financial shield, and a year-round necessity, your engagement platform should be a standing budget line in your council infrastructure, just like IT or HR systems.
Councils that fund an engagement platform as permanent infrastructure fund it once, and then run every single consultation on it, all year round. By the time next year's budget cycle rolls around, the residents are already there, informed, and ready to participate.
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