East Lothian Council budget: Labour, Conservative and SNP priorities revealed

Norman Hampshire

THE last year has continued to be difficult for all council services due to the pandemic. However, our dedicated staff have done everything possible to make sure our communities continued to receive their vital services.

This has come at considerable additional cost to the council and would have been impossible to achieve without the additional Covid funding. We still have Covid with us and its impacts will continue for many years to come. The recovery will take time and will put significant pressure on all service budgets unless more additional Covid funding is provided.

The Labour Group budget has to deal with an increase of over £12 million in the cost of providing the core services our communities used in 20/21. This increase is due to the demand for council services from the growth in our population, energy costs and inflation.

READ MORE: East Lothian Council sets its 2022/23 budget

The Scottish Government’s budget settlement has again reduced our core funding by £734,000 despite the significant growth of East Lothian’s population and the increasing cost of delivering services.

To balance our budget and protect services, we need to have a council tax increase this year of three per cent that will generate an additional £2 million. The additional 1,200 new homes completed will generate a further £2.2 million of new income.

With this income of £4.2 million, we still require over £8 million to just continue delivering the quality services we had in 20/21.

Reductions and efficiencies are now becoming harder to deliver at the same time as managing the significant growth we are experiencing, the increase in demand and the costs of new services.

To provide our staff the time to implement these changes and manage the increase in demand, we are going to use £7.1m of our available council reserves. They are available to us because this administration has protected them for difficult budget situations. This will allow the new council administration a year to find the savings and reductions required in the costs of delivering our services.

To cover the increase in the National Insurance contributions of £990,000, we are using the additional one-off Government funding to cover it this year. However, this will require even further service costs reductions next year to cover it.

Without the use of our £7.1 million reserves, we would have required a 13 per cent council tax increase just to keep our current services going.

Even with this difficult budget settlement, we have managed to identify some new vital community development funding to deal with an increase in anti-social behaviour in our communities. To support our community development staff, we have allocated an additional £182,000 over two years from our general services budget. We have also allocated £250,000 from our capital budget over two years to deliver new pump tracks at sites across East Lothian.

With our difficult revenue budget position and despite the underfunding we are receiving from the Government, East Lothian still has an ambitious five-year capital programme of £345 million.

In it we have included investment for new primary schools in East Linton, Blindwells, Craighall and Whitecraig. We will also complete the delivery of the new Wallyford secondary school and numerous school extensions and improvements, along with the expansion of the 1,140 hours facilities.

The last five years have been an extremely difficult time for East Lothian Council, dealing with Covid, reducing budgets and experiencing significant growth. However, the strong fiscal management of this administration taking the difficult decisions to reduce costs and increase income has enabled this council to be one of the best performing in Scotland.

I move the Labour Group budget as the best option for the future of council services and the people of East Lothian who will use them.

CONSERVATIVE: Budget speech by Lachlan Bruce, opposition leader

Lachlan Bruce

AS WE CONSIDER the plan placed before us, we need to consider the wider implications for our budget this year. We are making our decisions again on the basis of real-term cuts to our funding from the Scottish Government.

Let us not forget that these cuts are taking place whilst the Scottish Government has had significant rise in its funding from the UK Government. The Scottish budget is now £41 billion, the highest it has ever been, while local government in Scotland has seen a real terms funding drop of £251 million, according to COSLA. This is not including other decisions that affect the budget, such as those surrounding the floor adjustments, which is costing us £3.5m.

There needs to be real support for growing council areas like ours in future years.

To make up for those challenges means using every single available penny of reserves we can muster, which I completely understand and accept as prudent to protect our communities.

The council tax increase of three per cent this year won’t be easy for lots of people – and nor will it be easy to absorb increases in future years to come. It is my understanding that no one will pay more this year than they did last year on the council tax thanks to the additional funding from the UK central government, which is to be welcomed. But we will need to caution in future years that although the increase won’t be paid this year, it will impact people’s personal finances in future years.

The additional £1.5m from the Scottish Government that we have as unconfirmed in the budget hopefully does come through as projected. The budget lines detailing what it will be committed to are understandably very generic at this point.

The additional monies for anti-social behaviour and lower season ticket prices at coastal car parks are minor financial changes but to be welcomed. I know that in my ward, anti-social behaviour monies will be greatly received.

One area on anti-social behaviour I want to address is the CCTV monies which have been on our capital budget for three years now but haven’t been spent as of yet. Given the anti-social behaviour issues we know exist, I would ask officers to take away a plea from me to spend this money as soon as possible so that our CCTV is operational again.

It is well known in communities across East Lothian that CCTV cameras aren’t working and it isn’t good enough.

Of course, no one can look at this budget without considering the challenges that are going to face the council in the coming years.

The capital budget is very tight right up to our capital limits and, with the education review still to come, that is likely to become very difficult to manage and the need for more capital funding is going to become more acute.

We have had success of course getting funding to support our education expansion from the Scottish Government.

In terms of the revenue budget, again the future challenges. To find the £13 million necessary to close our deficit is going to mean tough choices and that should include the asset review going further and faster in my opinion, ensuring that we are closing unnecessary back office spaces.

The more staff we have working from home effectively the better in my view, as that means not only a financial saving for the council but the opportunity for our staff to have a better work-life balance. That is one area we should look at but there are other things we need to do, but I won’t bore colleagues by endlessly droning on about them.

So in conclusion, this budget clears out our reserves, raises council tax moderately and brings in small changes to some areas which are to be welcomed, but it does lay out the hard choices we have managed to avoid this year. It is a difficult budget for a difficult year. So I will support this budget with the clear mind that difficult choices still lie ahead.

SNP: Budget speech by SNP Group leader Stuart Currie

Stuart Currie

EAST Lothian has experienced, at times, simply overwhelming health issues arising from a terrible pandemic. The work done by staff within the council has been nothing short of miraculous.

There is no doubt that the ability to increase council tax comes with a responsibility to limit those increases to what is necessary.

And our view is that a below-inflation increase of three per cent is the maximum that was acceptable and that is why we have decided to support that proposal at the council today.

Let’s be clear, the cost-of-living crisis is being brought about by soaring energy costs but also by deliberate policy choices by the UK Government to massively hike National Insurance contributions that will have a huge impact on many people.

It would be in no one’s interest for this council to not increase council tax by an amount that ensures that the vital services we provide could not continue or had to be curtailed. The challenges that we face in the months ahead mean that the vital work this council does will be needed more than ever before.

I want to turn to a number of areas within the revenue and capital budgets to highlight what we believe are positive moves.

Funding to remove instrumental music charges are welcome. It is something we have campaigned on and the funding has now been delivered by the Scottish Government.

We need to remember there are still many areas of the council, including adult social care, that are still in the response mode to the pandemic.

The funding that has gone to the health and social care partnership will make a difference and the additional substantial funding that has been allocated in recent days will clearly help. However, we still face a huge recruitment and retention crisis within the sector and that needs to be resolved urgently. The demographics in East Lothian are only going in one direction and we will need to invest and innovate like never before to meet these challenges.

We very much welcome the support for low-income households, which will make a difference in tough times.

We support and welcome the additional funding to support small businesses recover through East Lothian.

On coastal car parking charges, I wouldn’t describe it as breaking news to say that our group’s view has not been aligned with the administration since the policy came about! However, our duty in opposition is to put forward what we can do wherever possible and therefore we welcome the agreement to reduce the cost of the season-ticket for coastal car parks by 20 per cent.

Finally, we want to welcome the additional funding for enhanced youth work.

On the capital investment plan proposals in the budget, first of all can I say how much we welcome the investment around areas like ICT and the provision for a reporting APP for members of the public to contact the council with the areas that require to be repaired and areas of concern?

I want to welcome the funding lines with respect to Haddington for work around the River Tyne and also in Tranent for additional funding in respect of Polson Park.

We are really pleased to see a line in the capital budget for the Drem to Gullane path project.

We want to give a huge welcome for the provision of social and healthcare facilities within the capital investment plan. Be in no doubt what this means – this is about securing land and delivering GP services in areas such as Wallyford.

Finally, in my view this year it has been so important to deliver certainty in the passage of this budget that, in tough financial times, still delivers shared ambitions for our communities and the people who send us here.

For the reasons set out, my colleagues and I will be supporting the budget before the council today.