​Maybe it’s time to replace council tax with a new local taxation system - Susan Dalgety

​As a former councillor, albeit a lifetime away in the 1990s, I know the pain of deciding whether to slash the schools budget or cut funding to old people’s homes.

I remember the shock of being told by a senior council official that if we merged care homes to make savings, there was a risk some of the elderly residents would die.

“Change can kill vulnerable people,” he said. The budget group I was a member of at the time looked at each other and said, “we won’t put forward that saving.”

Savings is a euphemism for cuts. It sounds more user-friendly, almost as if councillors are making sensible spending choices, instead of the reality, which is trying to keep essential council services afloat year after year as central government slashes funding.

Since the SNP came into power in 2007, almost another lifetime away, councils have seen their budgets cut to the bone. And the government’s latest wheeze – telling councils to freeze the council tax – will mean there is even less money to spend on housing, schools and roads. The things that make a city like Edinburgh work.

The Capital gets less government funding than most other parts of Scotland. Leader of the minority Labour administration, Cllr Cammy Day, pointed out last week that the city is hard done by.

"The Scottish average per capita is £2350 and for Edinburgh that is £1878, so we are around £500 underfunded per person despite the additional pressures we have as the Capital,” he said.

Labour’s budget, which includes an increase in council house rents of seven per cent and a huge hike in parking charges, is likely to be agreed at Thursday’s council meeting. Most of the horse trading between parties has already happened, but whatever spending plan is agreed, it won’t be enough to properly run a city as complex as ours.

Last week, Gordon Brown’s think tank, Our Scottish Future, published a paper on the future of Scotland’s councils, suggesting that council tax should be scrapped and a new system of local taxation set up. It may not be such a bad idea.