While others are thinking of buying presents and Christmas pudding the council’s Finance Convener Cllr Alasdair Rankin is still concentrating on the money that the council has to spend. Here he outlines for The Edinburgh Reporter how the council will deliver £67m of savings over the next three years.
Edinburgh is one of the fastest growing local authority areas in Scotland, we are facing an ever increasing demand for our services and the cost of providing these services is increasing. This sets us a big challenge with our annual budget as we must continue to deliver better services, keeping customers at the heart of everything we do.
Between 2015 and 2018, the Council’s annual budget will remain around £950 million. However the cost of providing services is expected to be £1.01 billion. That means we need to save £67 million from our budget, over the next three years, to make sure we can provide the services that are important to the people of Edinburgh.
We will make the £67m savings with budget proposals over the next three years and through a plan to transform the way we work and deliver our services.
Part of the task in transforming the way we work is to help our staff to simplify the services we provide, give customers better access to them and focus our efforts and resources on responding to local needs. Everyone in the Council is involved in this work, bringing forward new ideas and suggestions through our Better Outcomes through Leaner Delivery (BOLD) programme. This means that we can be confident that we are delivering the right services to those in the community who need them, while building a stronger economic future for the Capital.
A huge amount of work is being carried out improving our online services to better meet the needs of Edinburgh residents. We’re the first local authority in Scotland to offer a fully integrated online customer experience, with faster response times, automated transactions and responses to customers.
Our services have been designed and delivered with a customer first approach, with the aim of being easy to use and accessible. By improving our online services, this gives residents more choice of how they interact with us at a time that suits them best. As a Council, we want to encourage residents to move to the most cost effective and appropriate channel for them. Online transactions are 20 times cheaper than phone calls so for us, where customers have access to the web, this is a much more efficient way of doing business.
Since April, we’ve had over 10,000 transactional requests raised on our new online system and many of our highest volume transactions now available online, including reporting missed bins, broken streetlights and road problems.
This is a fantastic achievement and will help us to lower costs by reducing phone calls and visits to our offices, helping us to meet our budget savings of £67 million over the next three years.
The budget engagement period ends today and this is your last chance to have your say on our draft budget proposals for 2015/16. So far around 1,700 people have taken Edinburgh’s budget challenge, our online tool to find out how you would balance our books over the next three years. If you haven’t already, I would encourage you to give your views today before the engagement ends. The Council will then consider the feedback before making the final budget decisions on 12 February.
The Edinburgh Reporter interviewed Councillor Rankin last week just ahead of the Council’s consultation on their budget came to a close.
The Edinburgh Reporter NEWS Council budget from Phyllis Stephen on Vimeo.
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
