Best-practice budget engagement using Citizen Space and Dialogue
The challenge
Ahead of setting its 2026/2027 budget, the Council needed to understand what mattered most to residents: which services they wanted protected, where they would accept reductions if savings had to be found, and how they felt about Council Tax. It also wanted to test appetite for different ways of generating income and for involving communities more directly in delivering services.
This was not a simple ask, and it called for more than one kind of engagement. Some of what the Council needed was measurable: clear, comparable data on priorities and on Council Tax preferences that elected members could weigh when making decisions. But the Council also wanted to give residents room to think out loud, to put forward their own ideas and respond to each other's, rather than only ticking boxes on a list set by officers. A single survey, however well designed, can do the first job well but struggles to do the second.
There was an added complication. The survey went live on 5 December 2025, and then on 10 December the Council agreed to lower the provisional Council Tax rise for planning purposes from 9.5% to 7.5%. Changing the wording of a live survey question would have effectively split the results into two incompatible datasets.
The approach
Perth and Kinross met this challenge by running two complementary engagement tools side by side: Citizen Space for the structured survey, and Dialogue, Delib's deliberative engagement platform, for open idea-sharing. Together they let the Council gather both the hard, comparable numbers and the richer, conversational input that good budget-setting needs, all promoted through the same channels and open from December 2025 to January 2026, with offline versions available on request so participation was not limited to those online.
The Citizen Space activity captured clear, comparable priorities
The consultation needed to cover a lot of ground without becoming so long that people gave up partway through, a problem the Council had identified in previous years. Two features made that possible:
- Skip logic kept the survey focused. Rather than presenting every respondent with long lists of services to rank for both investment and reduction, the Council used skip logic, a feature that automatically routes people past questions that don't apply to them, so that follow-up questions only appeared where they were relevant. Respondents who favoured a higher Council Tax rise were asked which services to invest in; those who favoured a lower rise were asked where savings could come from. This directly addressed earlier feedback that previous surveys were too long and confusing.
- A mid-survey policy change was handled without breaking the data. Instead of editing the live Council Tax question and fragmenting the results, the Council added a clear explanatory note to the survey explaining the 10 December decision while leaving the response options intact. This kept all responses comparable as a single dataset, and the Council was later able to analyse responses submitted before and after the change to confirm it had not materially shifted residents' views.
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The consultation drew 946 responses, comfortably up on the 761 received for the previous budget survey, an increase of around 24%, with 97% coming from people who live in Perth and Kinross. It also performed strongly against the joint budget and Corporate Plan consultation that informed the 2023/2024 budget, which gathered 1,092 responses through a combination of online and in-person activity.
The consultation responses were fed back to elected members ahead of the budget meeting on in March of 2026, so they could be weighed directly in the decision-making. The Council then closed the loop publicly, publishing a clear "We asked, you said, we did" summary setting out the decisions and how they connected to what residents had said.
A Council Tax rise of 8.9% was approved, below the original 9.5% provisional figure. The agreed budget responded visibly to the consultation themes, including:
- An additional £15 million over three years for roads, pavements and bridges, described as the largest single investment of its kind the Council has ever made, alongside doubled resources for gully cleaning and ditch maintenance.
- A new Greenspace Enhancement Squad and the rejection of proposed cuts to street cleaning, directly answering concerns about public spaces.
- £200,000 for a City Centre Improvement Taskforce to deliver visible enhancements over spring and summer.
- Protection of community libraries, reflecting one of the consultation's strongest and most consistent themes, and one of the top-rated ideas in Dialogue.
- A feasibility study into a "care village" approach, acknowledging the social care pressures driving much of the Council Tax increase.
- £1.1 million to help local communities deliver projects tackling issues such as biodiversity and the cost of living, plus targeted funding for vulnerable young people, community mental health services, play parks, flood-risk support and rural community facilities.
This is a budget grounded in reality, shaped by what people have told us, and focused on meeting the needs of our communities”
The Perth and Kinross budget consultation is a model of best-practice engagement: using the right tool for each job rather than forcing everything through a single channel. Citizen Space provided the structured survey, with skip logic keeping a wide-ranging set of questions manageable and a mid-consultation policy change absorbed without compromising the data. Dialogue provided the deliberative space, letting residents generate, rate and discuss their own ideas. Together they produced a richer, more credible evidence base, gathering nearly a thousand survey responses plus a layer of genuine public conversation, and the Council managed the full journey from collection to analysis to a transparent published response across Delib's secure platforms.
For a council balancing real financial pressure with a genuine commitment to listening, combining a structured survey with deliberative dialogue is exactly what effective, modern budget engagement looks like.
Delib is a govtech leader specialising in consultation and engagement, trusted by over 600 government organisations worldwide, including major planning projects. Since 2004, we've been building secure, accessible digital platforms to make participation simpler, fairer, and more inclusive. Our flagship product, Citizen Space, was built in collaboration with the UK government and has supported more than 11 million responses across over 110,000 democratic activities.