Hansard

I told you exactly where I would take that money from; for a start, I would get rid of the vast and unnecessary bureaucracy that is the ministerial takeover of social care.

I point the Government to its own words. In its local elections manifesto, it said that it would

“improve and protect your local services”

and give local councils

“greater control and influence over decisions”.

The SNP promised those things last May, and the Greens were at it, too. They promised

“fair funding for public services”

and

“devolved decision-making”.

Those were the words of the Greens.

It took only 26 days after making big promises at those council elections last May for Kate Forbes and her Green colleagues to unveil their plans for more savage cuts in the spending review.

Last month, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills introduced a fresh sanctions regime for local government. If it did not do what the SNP-Green Government ordered, it would face penalties. The education secretary is treating councils like an enemy that is determined to cut teacher numbers. That is nobody’s wish; nobody is talking about that as a way forward. The way to protect teacher numbers is to adequately fund our local authorities.

The pattern goes back to 2007, which we can see from a recently released cabinet paper showing that John Swinney threatened to

“centralise the delivery of school education ... to play hardball with Cosla”.

None of that demonstrates the collaboration and partnership that we were promised. It puts local government and education in a headlock.

The Greens should listen to Andy Wightman—their former, respected member—who wrote in Holyrood magazine last month:

“The Scottish Government’s enfeebling of local councils is an attack on democracy.”

He also, rightly, suggested that we imagine that the boot were on the other foot and that the UK Government threatened financial penalties if Scottish ministers did not follow the Tory Government’s manifesto.

Local authorities need a fair deal from the Government and a power surge that recognises the importance of the work that they do. That means giving them more powers over economic development, planning and transport and ending the SNP power grabs that I have defined. They need new hope and not another ministerial takeover of social care, with a vast and unnecessary bureaucracy that would asset strip and trample over services once again.

Let me turn to council tax reform. Tom Arthur said that that is a key priority, but we know what that means. Like other key priorities before it, the SNP will make no reforms throughout the entirety of this parliamentary session; it has made it explicit that nothing will be rolled out before 2026. The Greens still cannot see that they have gone into Government on the promise of talks about talks—a working group, then a citizens’ assembly—and that, at the end of all that, we are being promised options. Tom Arthur says that those options could be anything from relatively minor to significant and fundamental—talk about kicking something into the long grass. Members do not have to take my word for it; Robin Harper, the former leader of the Greens, agrees.

There is no escaping the harm that this local government settlement will deliver to communities in every corner of Scotland, and the Liberal Democrats will oppose it this evening.