Edinburgh’s former council leader has said SNP councillors will seek to reverse a “whole host” of spending and saving decisions if the administration tables plans to overturn parts of the budget agreed last month.
Cllr Adam McVey said the council had been left in a “difficult position” after the ruling Labour group failed to pass their own budget and then supported Lib Dem proposals which crossed red policy lines on compulsory redundancies and outsourcing of services.
Council leader Cammy Day, who was urged to resign over the fiasco by opposition councillors and a couple of members of his own party, has since said he was looking at “all options” to ensure controversial elements of the budget are not enacted.
Now Cllr McVey has written to the council’s Chief Executive seeking clarity on the situation he labelled “a mess that needs to be sorted out”.
The SNP group leader said: “In normal processes, a budget is passed that has the confidence of the administration and the council chamber. Now we have a budget being passed which Labour are saying was an accidental process. Of course it wasn’t accidental, Labour actively voted for it.
“So we’re now in quite a difficult position, I think the officers will find this very difficult to work through.”
The Lib Dems’ budget proposed generating savings of “£500,000 in year one, rising to £2.5 million per annum in subsequent years” by looking at outsourcing waste and cleansing services. Together with ending the council’s long-standing no compulsory redundancy policy, it was agreed the measures would save £1.1 million in 2023/24.
However Cllr Day said despite the plans being passed it “does not change policy” and that the decisions would need to be ratified by a majority of councillors later down the line. He added: “There are also rules in the standing orders that allow us to reverse decisions after a period of time – so we’re looking at all options about how we can reverse this.”
Cllr McVey, who until last May served as council leader alongside Cllr Day as deputy in an SNP-Labour coalition, said whilst his group was “particularly concerned” about redundancies and outsourcing there were other parts of the budget his group would seek to reverse as well.
“If we start undoing the budget for some policies then frankly we should start undoing the budget for a whole host of others,” he said.
“If the budget has no integrity and no standing in the council then we’ll be looking to revise quite a number of policies that we wanted to pursue, because there was a lot in the SNP/Green budget that would have taken us further forward on tackling climate change and taken us further forward on a whole host of service improvements as well.
“All of that has to I think be up for discussion again.
“When we get to revising and hopefully undoing Labour’s votes that will allow us to have a broader discussion about all the things that were actually lost in that budget, additional money for rape crisis services for example.”
Such a move could make it more challenging for the administration to gain majority support in the City Chambers to only undo the two budget decisions they have been criticised over.
Cllr McVey continued: “If Labour are saying they have no responsibility as the administration then I go back to my initial thought – they have lost the budget, if they’re not taking any responsibility for the implementation of it or indeed the fixing of how this all went wrong then they need to resign.
“We’ve seen an SNP administration in Dumfries and Galloway resign when they lost their budget, they showed that leadership and integrity.”
In a letter to Edinburgh City Councils’ Chief Executive Andrew Kerr this week, he called for details to be given on “what officers’ next steps are in implementing these policy changes that were voted through and opportunities for the progressive opposition parties to challenge the adminstration’s plans”.
The council was approached for comment.
by Donald Turvill, Local Democracy Reporter.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) is a public service news agency. It is funded by the BBC, provided by the local news sector (in Edinburgh that is Reach plc (the publisher behind Edinburgh Live and The Daily Record) and used by many qualifying partners. Local Democracy Reporters cover news about top-tier local authorities and other public service organisations.
The Edinburgh Reporter met with Cllr Cammy Day and asked him about the way forward after the budget meeting. This is what he said
This was the point in the meeting where the voting took place. Green councillors voted for a variety of budgets ensuring that the Labour budget fell at the first vote.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) is a public service news agency. It is funded by the BBC, provided by the local news sector (in Edinburgh that is Reach plc (the publisher behind Edinburgh Live and The Daily Record) and used by many qualifying partners. Local Democracy Reporters cover news about top-tier local authorities and other public service organisations.
