Across Tayside and Fife, local councillors have set out grim budgets for the year ahead against a backdrop of cuts directed their way from London and Edinburgh.
With a duty to balance the books, and many of them facing multi-million pound funding gaps, local authorities have cobbled together their plans under threat of having government support pulled if they raised taxes to pay for additional spending.
But efficiencies were made long ago, and after years of cost cutting there is little fat left for councils like Fife to trim.
And councilors from all parties have been exceedingly clear – the spending cuts they have to make now will cause immediate hurt to the communities they serve. Unfortunately, that hurt will be felt long into the future.
One councillor told me this week: “Ultimately we get to a place, relative to where we started, that we can be happy, but you have to realise that it really is done line by line.
“Every pound that’s spent in one place is a pound taken from somewhere else. There’s no new money anywhere. You’re triaging what can survive and these aren’t services that are just nice to have either. They are vital.
“It’s a set of decisions our neighbours will have to live with the consequences of.”
The upset extends to SNP-run councils such as Angus, who went as far as issuing a public plea for understanding as they warned they could no longer afford to run “amazing services”.
“This is going to hurt,” the local authority warned, saying that with a £60 million deficit, it will have to focus on the provision of services it is legally obligated to deliver such as education.
They aren’t alone. Dundee City Council leader John Alexander, who represents the SNP, wrote this week how the budget process had forced him to do “much soul searching”.
Sadly, the rot of underinvestment will go well beyond the big, glitzy decisions such as whether a new school can be built, a library is closed down or if council car parking charges will be increased.
Writing for this newspaper, John Alexander rightly pointed out that, beyond the obvious council services such as refuse collection or the provision of leisure centres, the council’s budget invests millions in the background to ensure lifeline projects can support those who need them most.
Without that financial backing most of these services would simply cease to exist – their importance only magnified by their absence as the most vulnerable find themselves scrambling for support elsewhere.
But as well as those agenda-setting funding decisions, cuts also make the every day of running a local authority more difficult.
Essential repairs to school buildings are paused, leaving students uninspired as they spend days in classrooms seemingly held together by little more than luck alone.
Meanwhile equipment and vehicles are left to age beyond their useful life while staff who move on go unreplaced, draining local government of fresh talent, knowledge and expertise.
Areas like Angus and Dundee have bore the brunt of serial underinvestment for many years, and fed-up councillors seem ready to expose the reality of that, even if they might have kept quiet previously out of political loyalty to the SNP government.
And they will know that the decisions they have been forced to make will be felt in our communities for years to come.
In Dundee, where the council is pausing recruitment of teachers, and not replacing those who retire, there will inevitably be an exodus on newly trained teachers.
Those who have now completed their training will move out of the city, often to other Scottish local authorities but sometimes to other parts of the UK and abroad – where their skills are in demand.
They will represent a generation of lost talent, and when funding becomes available in the future to boost numbers again, what hope will we have of convincing them to return?
None of this has happened by accident. It is the result of years of political choices made far away from those worst hit when key services come under strain.
While the budget decisions for this year have now been made, both the Scottish and UK governments would do well to commit to not prompting another year of cuts.
That’s why Humza Yousaf’s promise to finally fulfill the SNP’s 2007 pledge to reform council tax is a welcome
He would be rightly be outraged if the UK Government froze his tax raising powers to score political points.
So any credible reform will involve him ensuring that neither he nor any of his successors can hold the budgets of local authorities to ransom by announcing sudden council tax freezes to score short-term political points.
If these changes can be achieved, it may go some way to repairing the damage this latest round of cuts will cause.
ALASDAIR CLARK: SNP leave councils to set grim budgets – it can’t be allowed to happen again
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29.02.2024
Across Tayside and Fife, local councillors have set out grim budgets for the year ahead against a backdrop of cuts directed their way from London and Edinburgh.
With a duty to balance the books, and many of them facing multi-million pound funding gaps, local authorities have cobbled together their plans under threat of having government support pulled if they raised taxes to pay for additional spending.
But efficiencies were made long ago, and after years of cost cutting there is little fat left for councils like Fife to trim.
And councilors from all parties have been exceedingly clear – the spending cuts they have to make now will cause immediate hurt to the communities they serve. Unfortunately, that hurt will be felt long into the future.
One councillor told me this week: “Ultimately we get to a place, relative to where we started, that we can be happy, but you have to realise that it really is done line by line.
“Every pound that’s spent in one place is a pound taken from somewhere else. There’s no new money anywhere. You’re triaging what can survive and these aren’t services that are just nice to have either. They are vital.
“It’s a set of decisions our neighbours........
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