Hansard

Fair funding for local government has been something that Scottish Labour has campaigned on throughout the entire term of the Parliament, so we welcome the debate today, short though it is, and the motion in Annie Wells’s name. Even before the economic impact of coronavirus became apparent, local authorities had seen as much as £900 million in real terms cut from non-ring-fenced revenue budgets since 2013 alone.

However, it is in these unprecedented times that we live in now that we have all seen at first hand how local government has been by far best placed to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic on the ground, stepping in to ensure that our most vulnerable people have been fed and cared for, and I would like to associate myself with Sandra White’s acknowledgment of the efforts of local government staff. Not only did they keep vital services going in these unprecedented circumstances, they stepped up to the plate, as Annie Wells said, to build resilience in their communities and they delivered the business support packages that the Scottish ministers announced with great fanfare. The very least that they deserve in return is a fair funding package so that they can chart their communities’ way out of this crisis in both the medium and long term with confidence that they will have the resources to do so.

Sarah Boyack was quite right when she said that councils have been drip fed micromanaged funding from the Scottish Government throughout the pandemic, so it is now vital that councils are fully funded for their loss of income during the crisis and that fair funding solutions are put in place in the longer term to ensure that they weather the continuing effects of the pandemic and can support their communities as levels of poverty and inequality continue to increase as a consequence of Covid.

Presiding Officer, as you know, I have been around long enough—long before blueprints for local government—to remember the then finance secretary’s “historic concordat” with local government. There was much talk then of mutual respect, parity of esteem and an end to ring fencing; jokey comparisons were made at the time with Neville Chamberlain and his famous piece of paper. Alas, the concordat has proved just as worthless over the years. Councils have been singled out, year on year, for cuts far greater than any faced by the Government. Ring fencing has not so much crept back as roared back—COSLA complains that 60 per cent of councils’ funding is now allocated before it even reaches them. That is not empowering councils; it is undermining them.

The cabinet secretary and some of her colleagues talked about the brass neck of the Tories in bringing the motion. Like Elaine Smith, I spent the 1980s and 1990s as an activist—in my case, in Lothian and Edinburgh—fighting against cuts as the then Tory Governments tried to eviscerate local government. This Parliament was meant to protect our local services from that but, for the past 14 years, it is the devolved SNP Government that has had councils on the rack. [Interruption.] I do not have time to take an intervention.

I gently say to SNP colleagues that, if they are aggrieved at a Tory motion telling them to treat local government fairly, they really should reflect on how it has come to that, 14 years on from the heady hubris of the historic concordat. Perhaps they need to reflect on the intervening years and perhaps they need to remind themselves and remind Patrick Harvie that that concordat con trick was part of an SNP and Tory partnership budget that went through the Parliament in the first place.

Councils have stepped up to the plate in the pandemic; it is time that Government showed them the respect that they deserve, as the motion and the Labour amendment do this evening.