Meeting of the Parliament 06 March 2018
It is SNP members who—year after year, and for seven years in a row—have pressed their buttons in this Parliament to allocate cuts to local council budgets.
An analysis in The Times yesterday helpfully looked at what is happening on the ground, council by council. Let us take the example of jobs. In Aberdeenshire, 370 jobs will be lost; in East Renfrewshire, 300 jobs will be lost; in Renfrew—Mr Mackay’s own area—200 jobs will be lost; in Fife, 190 jobs will be lost; in North Ayrshire, 50 jobs will be lost; in the Scottish Borders, 35 jobs will be lost; in Orkney, 14 jobs will be lost; and in Angus, 16 teaching posts will be lost. The total number of jobs that will be lost is just short of 1,200. If that number of jobs was being lost in an industry or in a factory, the Scottish Government would rightly be setting up a task force as a matter of urgency; instead, the cabinet secretary has come here today to ask us to vote for an allocation that will cut jobs and services.
The cabinet secretary tells us, in reasonable tones, that it is a well-resourced budget. Again, let us look at what is happening across the country. Yesterday, West Dunbartonshire voted for a budget that will result in £2.5 million of cuts to services such as meals on wheels. Such cuts will have a real impact on local communities.
I contend that the cuts to council budgets will not help the Government to achieve its policy objectives. The Government will, understandably, want to see improvements in educational performance and the statistics for the crucial skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, but it is difficult to see how we can make that happen if we are taking teaching and classroom assistant posts out of schools, as some councils are having to do.