Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser
Council counting cost of pandemic
Three Labour councillors have quit the Labour group on North Lanarkshire Council over the past few months; all three have become Independents.
This leaves the current council at 30 SNP, 30 Labour, eight Conservative and seven Independent members.
Of the seven Independents, only two were actually elected in May 2017 under the description “Independent” on their ballot paper.
And two council by-elections are due in November for the 77-member local authority.
The loss of three councillors has made the Labour administration more openly dependent on the Tories in crucial votes. During the council’s last full meeting on March 19, we saw the first joint motion by the Labour and Tory leaders.
The first virtual-style full council meeting will take place on August 13. During these five months, the chief executive has taken the decisions which went through the council.
The local authority will receive a financial statement at the August 13 meeting on how it has been hit by Covid-19 costs over the past six months.
This will lead to the council having to adjust the current 2020-21 revenue budget to absorb the costs of the coronavirus pandemic.
This is likely to mean even deeper cuts in council service provision for the remainder of the financial year, from September 2020 to April 2021; cuts proposals which were rejected in the last budget meeting in February might now have to be reconsidered.
Crucial to support for local authorities will be the London Treasury giving borrowing powers to the Scottish Government, which was requested by Scottish finance secretary Kate Forbes.
Ms Forbes has also requested powers from London to transfer capital spend into revenue spend to meet every day costs of the crisis.
Alarmingly, nearly one in three Scots able to work are currently either unemployed or on furlough, with the furlough scheme ending in the autumn.
The UK Government seem unprepared for the tough times ahead after September.
Boris Johnson’s grand announcement of a £5 billion construction “New Deal” is nowhere near the financial support required.
To put this in context, the UK Government is spending £4 billion to refurbish the Palace of Westminster, including £350 million for a House of Lords rooftop restaurant.
Norway, with the same population as Scotland, is spending 420 billion kroner (£35.27 billion) of its sovereign oil wealth fund this year to counter the costs of Covid-19.
The UK Tory £5 billion “plan” represents allocating 0.24 per cent of GDP; Germany plans a budget spend of four per cent of its GDP to combat the pandemic.
Meanwhile,the council and all other local authorities are preparing for the possibility of the pandemic worsening in the autumn and possible local lockdowns like we have seen in Leicester, Gretna and Melbourne.
“Local” outbreaks could apply to Airdrie or Coatbridge but, with 50 per cent of North Lanarkshire workers employed in Glasgow or Edinburgh areas, local lockdown of a large office-block in either city could also cause lockdowns in North Lanarkshire.