Residents will have final say on how a pot of their council tax is spent for the first time in Cumbria.

Penrith Town Council agreed in principal to launch a participatory budget of £10,000, the public will decide which projects it funds.

Councillor Jonathan Davies of Putting Cumbria First masterminded the move, calling on the full town council to support it at their latest meeting on Monday.

The motivation behind the motion was to increase engagement with the public and put them at the heart of decision making. A series of workshops would see groups pitching their dream project to residents.

Councillor Doug Lawson said: "I think anything that encourages people in Penrith to be thinking about their community, to be thinking about building Penrith and improving Penrith is a good idea.

"I read some of the background documents, I'm a little confused about how this differs from what CCEG (Community Culture and Economic Growth Committee) does and whether it would actually be better just looking at what CCEG does and perhaps tweaking it a little bit."

"A lot of the early PB stuff has been done elsewhere since were just handing out small grants to local community projects which is what we're doing out of CCEG anyway. I wonder if this just creating a second CCEG."

But Cllr Davies said: "How it works normally is that rather than the council making decisions, groups will come forward- community groups, local organisations that do projects in the town - will come forward with ideas and it will be the community that decides what projects get the funding, what the funding is allocated to.

"This is more to give that final say to the people. Groups can Dragons Den style pitch their projects to the communities."

Cllr Davies, who represents Penrith West said that participatory budgets are operated around the world successfully.

"We'd aim for a workshop day or series of workshop events where ultimately groups come forward with projects, they present their projects to people in the community, the community come along and ultimately vote on which one they think should get the funding.

"It's operating around the world already we're not reinventing the wheel, there are frameworks there that it works successfully with."

Chairman and mayor Charlie Shepherd seconded the motion to launch a participatory budget, as he is in support of new ways to involve the public in decision-making.

The motion includes a condition that any unspent budget from the CCEG will be allocated to supplement the initial £10,000 PB allocation.

A report will be brought to the council considering the governance implications and the approach.