Edinburgh voters may need to break their national party allegiance to get a better council – Iain Whyte

If you are an Edinburgh resident reading this, you probably agree that it is a great place to live. Our city has great public spaces and architecture and a lot to do for its size. So how would you improve it?

Do you regularly think we need wholesale change and flashy new projects that stand out in their surroundings? Or is it that some of the public spaces around you seem unkempt, shoddily repaired, decaying or disregarded? They need basic improvement and upkeep and some standards need to be set to make our existing public services better.

Last week we looked at the council’s service performance for the year and, once again, it was clear that the ruling SNP and their Labour voting fodder would rather talk about big flashy projects or national politics than concentrate on local services. Distraction and spin rather than honesty and improvement.

The truth is that performance has declined on over a third of the things we measure and fails to hit the target the council sets itself on over 40 per cent. All from a low base when compared to other Scottish councils and people are paying council tax increases well above the promise of three per cent maximum that was broken in this year’s council budget.

But even this isn’t the whole picture and masks some sleight of hand being used to massage the figures.

In areas as diverse as street cleaning and P1 reading achievement they have reduced the target this year. In others like recycling they ranked things as “green” for good because it stayed the same as last year even though we recycled less waste than in each of the two years before that.

Some measures like reducing carbon emissions are predicted to heroically meet target later this year but the trend from the last few years shows the city falling short.

On fundamental issues like hospital delayed discharge things are no better. Despite the rush to get people out of hospital as the pandemic struck the numbers remain stubbornly similar to last year and are still well above the level inherited by this SNP/Labour administration in March 2017.

What do the Edinburgh public think of all this? Well we don’t know because the SNP chose not to ask them this year.

Maybe they are embarrassed that the previous survey results didn’t meet their usual spin that all is rosy with council services.

The final distraction tactic was an assertion that performance drops could be blamed on the coronavirus pandemic. An insult to people’s intelligence when the lockdown only affected two weeks out of the 52 that were being considered.

In politics many will be looking ahead to next year and the Scottish Parliament elections. You might even have a favourite political party you already support.

If you care about our city and how it is run I would ask you to think a bit further to the council elections of 2022.

As has been commented elsewhere in the Evening News you might need to break with your usual national allegiance to get a better council.

Look carefully at the way politicians behave in the Council Chamber. My Conservative colleagues will continue to put Edinburgh first, ahead of national politics, and we will always seek better local services and value for the tax you pay.

Cllr Iain Whyte is the Conservative Group leader at Edinburgh City Council

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