Liberal Democrats protecting school budgets

The Liberal Democrats published their own headlines earlier today on Twitter saying that they would table a full costed council budget to stop cuts to school budgets, address the state of the roads and pavements and invest in parks and improved city cleaning.

The council faces having a £76 million deficit but Group Leader Kevin Lang said on Twitter that the Scottish Government was cutting Edinburgh council’s budget by that amount, which we don’t think is exactly the same thing.

But in common with other parties, particularly the Labour group the LibDems say that funding from The Scottish Government is reducing and the climate in which spending will be set is a challenging one. The group recommends that using Best Value service reviews the council should examine its spending in future, which might save around £500,000, and that the council increases revenue through empty commercial property to bring these back into use.

The headline on the LibDem proposals is that they want to make compulsory redundancies among council staff resulting in a saving in a £1 billion or so budget of £600,000. The administration has undertaken not to make any compulsory redundancies, and that was also the policy of the last administration which was an SNP/Labour coalition.

The LibDems propose the following:

• increase council tax by 4.76%
• Allocate £3 million to the King’s Theatre
• Spend £2 million on prevention of flooding
• Spend £3 million on improvements to greenspaces
• Spend an additional £11 million on roads, paths and pavements
• save money by turning down heating in council offices from 19° to 18°
• Fund the Climate & Sustainability team with £279,000
• Spend an additional £3 million on gully cleaning, fly tipping, graffiti removal and street sweeping
• protect school budgets by spending £5.5 million on teachers and pupil support assistants
• review the Speech and Language Therapy budget of £370,000 and put savings into school budgets
• Raise £40,000 by charging property developers more for Road Occupation Charges

And in a tongue twisting amendment to the administration budget proposals, the group suggests: “Council agrees to allocate £4.65 million from the administration budget priorities fund for the purpose of avoiding the allocated funding reductions set out in proposal ECS6.”

The budget will be set by councillors at a meeting on Thursday in the City Chambers. All papers and ways to watch the meeting online are here.

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