KIM LONG Councils must be recognised in budget for their support to citizens

THIS week I went to a community meeting about a huge new strategy launched by the council. This document will inform planning decisions about the entire north of the city for the next 30 years – what is allowed to be built, and what is not. And yet this crucial piece of work has been presented to communities from above – a top-down bureaucracy that relies on people having to seek out, find, download a 75-page document, be able to read english and understand technical language, and then make time to make a comment, of which they’ll never know the outcome.

It’s ludicrously inaccessible. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sat in a committee and heard disappointment at low numbers of consultation responses – but why is anyone surprised that communities get cynical and disengaged when this is how the council routinely does engagement?

The SNP, in Government and leading the council in Glasgow, talk a good game about community empowerment, but the way they treat communities is actively disempowering.

Of course, the council has scant capacity to do better. Councils themselves have been systematically de-funded and disempowered by the Scottish Government, with budgets that take no account for how much pressure local authorities are under with an aging population, and a growing population, on top of pay increases and inflation.

Every winter, Councils must wait for budgets to be passed down from Holyrood, along with the new policies they are supposed to implement next. This is not a relationship between equal partners.

Every decision about the pandemic has been made at national level, and yet the response has been through local services.

It’s councils who run homecare services, organise emergency homeless accommodation, coordinate shielding support, and work with the third sector to set up emergency food hubs.

It’s councils who administer business support grants, collect waste, and send out environmental protection officers to check restaurants are closed when they should be.

It’s also councils who have lost money because services have closed, and who face huge reductions in council tax income because so many families are – understandably – struggling to pay.

This is on top of the dire situation local budgets were already in before the pandemic. And so this year, the projected funding gap between what the council has and what it needs to run essential services is off the charts. Cuts at this would mean the libraries can’t reopen, a loss of teachers, and a failure to protect vulnerable people.

This scenario cannot be allowed to happen – not least because the pandemic has widened inequality in our city. All councillors would surely be unable to vote for a budget like this.

Community empowerment means trusting local people to make the best decisions for their local area. It means listening when local councils say things are in a crisis, and not just blaming Westminster and pretending everything is fine.

So it’s down to the SNP in Holyrood to draft a budget that recognises the extraordinary response local councils have provided to support our citizens. And also recognises the crisis that was already there, and is within their control to fix.