Earlier this week opposition councillors learned of the additional cuts totalling £9.916M that the SNP administration is proposing to make to close the council’s budget gap of £22.881M for
2016/17. These include significant sums from home care, social care, children
and families service and a combined total
£1.3M from the road maintenance, street lighting and winter maintance budgets.
Some of the proposals include the redesign of the way services
are delivered to improve their delivery and streamline existing structures,
which begs the question that if this can be done without having a negative impact on service delivery then why wasn’t it
done years ago.
Cutting nearly £23M in total from next year’s budget is bound
to cause difficulties. The most regular complaint I receive from constituents currently
is about the number of potholes in carriageways across Dundee. Cutting the revenue
budget by so much is sure to have a big impact on routine maintenance. There is
also a proposal to suspend the roll out of the domestic recycling service. A
large part of Broughty Ferry was in the first phase of the roll out and those residents
are to be notified of the cessation of free liners for their food waste containers.
As well as the cuts I also have some concern about the increase
in charges, for instance in Broughty Ferry the cost for parking for up to an
hour in the off street car parks is to go up by 50%
A lot of this could have been avoided if the SNP had
given Dundee its fair share of the Scottish Government budget. I mentioned in
an earlier post that the Scottish Government’s budget shows that for 2016/17
the year-on-year cash increase is £0.5 billion, which represents a standstill
budget in real terms, yet the local government grant settlement for 2016/17
reflects an overall cash cut at national level of £350M. Dundee’s reduction in grant
funding amounts to £11.319. With savings of £14.002M already having been made further
cuts could have been avoided if Dundee was allocated its fair share.
The SNP administration appears to have meekly accepted these cuts without speaking up for Dundee. I’m pretty sure if there had
been a Labour or Conservative Scottish Government in place Dundee’s SNP politicians
would have been demanding that action be taken.
I have already met with the executive director of corporate services
about the budget and I intend to raise issues with the executive directors of
the other departments in the coming week.
