A SENIOR councillor says Inverclyde should 'bin' its participatory budgeting programme and branded it a waste of time.

Conservative David Wilson asked officials to abandon the scheme at a meeting of the council's policy and resources committee.

A report outlined how the council had missed a target for one per cent of its budget to have been allocated through participatory budgeting.

Councillor Wilson said: "It's not worked very well, it's not proving to be successful.

"It's something that's taking up time and I don't think it's a priority for this council.

"Can we not just bin it now?"

Council education boss Ruth Binks told him that the choice about whether to end the programme was a political decision and reminded him that the council had signed up to implementing the programme.

Council leader Stephen McCabe admitted the scheme 'may die a quiet death'.

He said: "Participatory budgeting is all right when you've got stable budgets or growing budgets, but when you're year-on-year cutting your budgets it's not an easy thing to implement.

"That's the challenge we've got and I suspect it's slipped further down the government's pecking order so it may well die a natural death at some point."