As Edinburgh’s public services face bleak future, party loyalty may be stretched to limit – Steve Cardownie

The City of Edinburgh Council meets tomorrow to determine its budget priorities for a one-year budget set within a three-year framework. It will decide how it will meet its savings target of £35 million this year and set out its stall for the following two years to meet the additional savings target of around £53m. Tough decisions will have to be made and it won’t be pretty but the council is required to set a legal budget, which leaves it no option.

Tomorrow will see the culmination of a process which started immediately after the council set its budget last year and the administration has been embroiled in a whole raft of meetings before reaching this point. The budget has been a permanent item on the SNP group’s agenda and no doubt other groups will have been discussing the same issue at some length.

Councillor Alasdair Rankine (SNP), the Finance Committee convener, told me that he reckons he has attended more than 100 meetings on the matter since last year, including administration “away days” and the weekly meetings of the Coalition Budget Group, which comprises the leader and deputy leader of the council along with the vice-convener of finance and senior council officials.

A lively affair

It is anticipated that the Conservatives, Greens and Liberal Democrats will all submit their budgets for consideration tomorrow, so at least the electorate will be able to see what areas they have singled out for savings, but the administration budget will undoubtedly gain the votes it requires to get through and become council policy. The three councillors who make up the independent group of Epic could submit amendments but will likely abstain in the final vote, making the point that they do not have the same access to information that other groups have, making it difficult to construct a legal budget.

The administration has set its priorities around tackling poverty, sustainability and well-being and its budget proposals should reflect these goals, although other groups on the ­council will have their say on the matter. Whatever happens, the annual budget meeting is arguably the most important of the year for the council and usually turns out to be a lively affair (I kid you not), although the level of debate will probably not live up to its star billing.

Readers of the letters column in this paper could not fail to notice that the administration is not without its critics, with some of the more vitriolic ­criticisms coming from within the coalition itself.

Collective responsibility

Two Labour councillors in particular have made no secret of the fact that they feel that the coalition is not doing enough to defend the city from budget cuts and have reserved some of their fiercest comments for the council leader, SNP councillor Adam McVey.

In the light of this, it will be interesting to see what position they adopt at tomorrow’s meeting. Do they vote for the administration budget and then continue to harp on about their ­perceived injustice of the savings that they have just voted through? Or do they finally decide to break ranks with their group and demonstrate their unhappiness by abstaining?

Time will tell. I am not denying that they are entitled to hold the view that they do but as part of a group on the council, collective responsibility usually dictates that you have the debate within the group and then stick to the majority decision taken. However, there sometimes comes a point when principle overrides such convention and that point may be reached tomorrow.

Whatever happens at the ­meeting there is no denying that loyalties may be stretched to the limit and that ­matters may not run as smoothly as the administration might hope. But, when moving the coalition budget, Councillor Rankine will no doubt stress that it forms the best possible outcome for the city council and the Edinburgh public.

The effects of the proposed savings will be felt throughout the city and there is more to come over the next two years which, if matters don’t improve, will make for a pretty bleak future for public services.