Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser
Budget disappointment
After a number of months of hard work, and meetings with North Lanarkshire’s assistant chief executives, the SNP group produced our annual budget at the council’s finance meeting on February 23.
Prior to it, we wondered about the Tories and what position they would take.
Some time ago they said they were not going to produce a budget, then they said they were. We also wondered if they would support Labour, or perhaps abstain in the vote.
Not only did they support Labour, we discovered they had been working with them over a period of time to produce a joint budget, a comment made by every Tory councillor who spoke.
Included in their budget is a £1 million cut to education, and with the Tories involved, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as they didn’t support the pilot project for Food 365, feeding schoolchildren every day of the year.
As you all know by now, that proposal went through, but no thanks to the Tories.
We had some really good items in the SNP budget, and because it was defeated, it means some of them will not now go through.
The first of these items came about after I attended a meeting a couple of months ago with our MSPs, MPs and representatives of North Lanarkshire Women’s Aid.
It was called because of the major problems Women’s Aid have had with the council; if our budget had passed,