COUNCIL umbrella body Cosla said yesterday that its members have “no room to manoeuvre” financially as a new report on funding emerged.
Research by the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Spice) revealed massive variations in the drop in per capita spending by different authorities over the last five years.
At £504 per head, the Western Isles suffered the deepest cut, while the reduction for least-hit Orkney dropped by just £6 per head.
The councils were at opposite ends of a scale in which the average figure was £148. For Glasgow, it was £233, with £226 recorded for Edinburgh, £288 for Argyll and Bute and £36 for North Ayrshire.
The results refer to changes during the period from 2013/14 to 2018/19.
However, Spice cautioned that the numbers do not tell the whole story due to alterations in the way councils’ cash is allocated.
It said: “These changes represent both changes to population, and changes to funding, so should not be attributed solely to one or the other.”
The report said council funding will increase by £28.7 million this year after four years of cuts worth almost £750m.
It showed real-terms total funding for local authorities dropped by seven per cent between 2013/14 and 2017/18. This year’s increase equates to a real terms boost of 0.3 per cent, with revenue and capital spending for councils amounting to almost £10.7 billion in 2018/19.
Responding to the findings, a Cosla spokesperson said: “There is no doubt local authorities have suffered the brunt of cuts in recent years and the simple truth is that Scotland’s councils have no room left to manoeuvre in terms of budgets.
“This report backs up both our fair funding for essential services report as well as the improvement service benchmarking report.”
However, the Scottish Government said: “These figures exclude a number of important, additional funding sources, including £355m for health and social care and £150m of funding that is provided outwith the core settlement, but which benefits local government.
“When those are included, there has been a slight decrease of just 0.8 per cent between 2013 and 2019, compared to a 1.8 per cent cut to the Scottish Government revenue budget over the same period.”
A spokesman continued: “In 2018/19, our £10.9bn local government finance settlement will provide a real-terms increase in both revenue and capital, at a time when the Scottish revenue budget faces continued real-terms cuts – showing that we have treated local government very fairly in face of those reductions.
“With local authorities using their powers to increase council tax by the maximum allowable three per cent, they now have access to an additional £251.9m for day-to-day spending on local services, compared to 2017/18.”
However, Scottish LibDems leader Willie Rennie claimed: “Councils have always been first in line for the chop and the victims of the SNP’s obsession with centralisation.”
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