Sturgeon squabbles while families face soaring council tax
NICOLA Sturgeon was last night squabbling with local authorities and unions as Scots families face the threat of punishing £204 hikes in their council tax bills.
The First Minister insisted the SNP’s popular council tax freeze had been ‘fully funded’ by the Scottish Government in a debate in Holyrood.
But COSLA, the councils’ umbrella group, and Unison hit back, accusing her government of putting local services at risk.
This week, Moray Council announced plans for an 18 per cent rise, which would cost owners and tenants in Band D homes an extra £204 a year.
Several other local authorities are poised to follow suit, with secret talks under way about a co-ordinated attack by Labour-led councils.
Fife Council is consulting on a possible 7.5 per cent tax hike, while Aberdeen councillors will meet next week to discuss a rise of up to 10 per cent.
Independent-led Highland Council will discuss increasing bills by 5 per cent next week, after 61 per cent of residents voted in favour in a survey.
Sources said discussions about ending the freeze are also taking place in North Lanarkshire, Falkirk and Dumfries and Galloway. Any councils who do break the tax freeze deal face being ‘fined’ by SNP ministers. That means the first 3 per cent raised by Highland Council, for example, would go to paying back the Scottish Government.
Miss Sturgeon told First Minister’s Questions at Holyrood yesterday: ‘The council tax freeze is fully funded. The Scottish Government gives councils money to compensate for not increasing their council tax rates.
‘Indeed, a recent Scottish parliament information centre report said that the council tax freeze is possibly overfunded, with an estimated £164.9million extra going to local government. Those are the facts.’
But a COSLA spokesman hit back, saying: ‘This is untrue and misleading – we have had our funding cut by £350million. To suggest that it has been overfunded is a fallacy, indeed in recent years we would question whether it has been funded at all.’
Unison, which represents public sector workers, said that even if the council tax freeze was funded, the SNP government has still presided over swingeing cuts to local authorities.
In December, Finance Secretary John Swinney cut councils’ budgets by £774million, though this was reduced to £350million with the transfer of funds from the health budget.
Dave Watson of Unison said: ‘The bottom line is she’s cutting and many services are suffering. I don’t dispute that people like the council tax freeze, but there’s been a notable shift in the last year or so that people understand it can’t go on forever.’
At Holyrood yesterday, opposition parties blamed the SNP for local government cuts.
Scots Labour leader Kezia Dugdale said: ‘Can the First Minister tell me how her £500million of cuts to council budgets will help to solve the social care crisis? The problem of council cuts is not going away and the social care crisis is not going away. People are dying while waiting for support.
‘Is that really the Scotland that the First Minister wants to live in?’