COUNCILS expect to be hit with a £350 million cut to their grants when the Scottish Government announces its Budget tomorrow, The Herald understands.
The predicted figure, identical to last year’s 3.5 per cent cut, has emerged following a special meeting yesterday involving the majority of the country’s 32 local authority leaders and their finance chiefs in Edinburgh.
It is understood the figure is based on unofficial communications between Government civil servants and Cosla, the umbrella body for councils.
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Senior local government sources said they had been bracing themselves for cuts of up to £600m for the next year, with the reduction in line with what many had been preparing for.
Speaking ahead of the meeting, Cosla president David O’Neill warned that local authorities could not take any more cuts, adding “a cut of the magnitude of last year’s £349m would have a disastrous impact on both communities and services”.
One source said: “The figure we expect following the Cosla meeting is a £350m cut. It’s what many had been forecasting as a top line figure and there will probably be conditions attached to that, probably around council tax, teacher numbers and that.
“The general feeling of those coming out of the meeting was they had got the answer they had expected. Just a few days ago there was talk across local government of a five to six per cent cut and there’s a sense today in some quarters that maybe that was misinformation to make Thursday not seem so bad.”
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Another source said: “This is about what was expected. I think there is some relief it’s not worse. Not sure what guarantees there have been on the integrated health service money that helped balance the books last year.”
The move, which Finance Secretary Derek Mackay is expected to announce in his first Budget tomorrow, is likely to spark council tax rises at several local authorities after a decade’s freeze.
Scottish Borders Council’s administration has already said it intends to propose a three per cent increase in council tax, which it estimates will raise £1.5m towards funding its services. A number of northern authorities are tipped to follow suit.
The figures comes as one of the major unions said low-paid council workers would “suffer further punishment” following the Budget. Unite said a meeting scheduled this week of the Scottish Joint Council, which brings together trade unions and local authorities to negotiate pay, was postponed.
Unite and other local government trade unions will protest at the Scottish Parliament tomorrow in advance of the Budget announcement. Cosla said it would not comment on the settlement until it had been announced.
But Mr O’Neill said: “All too often when we talk of cuts to local government these are seen in the abstract. The reality is we are talking about real cuts to services and jobs.
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“A cut to local government means a cut in teaching assistants, a cut in levels of care for all our elderly relatives, cuts for the homeless as a freezing winter starts to bite and cuts to gritting of the roads at a time of freezing temperatures when trains and the wider transport network is struggling to cope.”
The Scottish Government has insisted councils had been treated “very fairly” by the SNP and had “experienced the same reduction in funding as was imposed on the Scotland by Westminster”.
It also pointed to a report from Audit Scotland which it said had made clear local government had been treated reasonably and that finances to councils had been maintained on a like-for-like basis from 2012 to 2016.
A Scottish Government spokesman said: “ The Scottish Government has consistently given local government fair funding to support essential public services and this year will be no different. It would be wrong for anyone to speculate on the Budget ahead of seeing the full details which the Finance Secretary will set out on Thursday.”
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