Greens will again try to improve budget

In recent months I have been involved in constructive discussions with the SNP Government to deliver a Scottish budget that protects services and improves public sector wages funded by fairer taxation.

Austerity budgets have been getting handed from Westminster down to Holyrood and on to councils for some years now. Last year the Greens prioritised council funding in our discussions and it worked. We secured £160m for council services across Scotland.

For Stirling, the Green deal meant £2.8m extra funding, which resulted in the council reversing proposed cuts to schools and public transport, increasing money for services to support the most vulnerable, investing in new apprenticeships, roads, footpaths and a range of other priorities.

This year the Scottish Government draft budget is again threatening a gap in council funding which cannot be closed by modest rises in Council Tax alone. Last week, the Scottish Parliament agreed a Green motion that laid out our concerns about the draft budget.

It’s clear that changes will now have to be made before it can pass through Holyrood in a few weeks, but it will require political parties to stop grandstanding and come to the table with realistic options for improving the settlement. It appears so far, that the Greens are the only political party willing to do this.

Greens have also been making the case to start investing in the infrastructure we will need for a low carbon future. Less emphasis on trunk roads and more spend on rail projects such as extending the Stirling-Alloa rail route to Dunfermline.

In Stirling, the proposed local council cuts are finally out to public consultation and it makes for grim reading. While there are some creative ideas for income generation there are many damaging cuts proposed by the SNP-Labour administration.

Cutting back on the already stretched community warden service makes no sense. There needs to be an effective team to deal with issues such as anti-social behaviour, littering, parking problems and dog fouling. With cuts to the treatment of dangerous hogweed and litter deep cleans, our communities are going to look and feel untidy and unsafe.

Sharing head teachers between schools, cutting support teams and educational psychologists and reducing the quality of school dinners are all, in their own ways, damaging cuts to education. The council must be upfront over which schools they want to take shared headships over the four year cuts programme.

Wages in the public sector have been static for many years, with teachers for example facing spiralling workloads, leaving many staff to put in dozens of extra hours of effectively unpaid labour every week. It’s right that a fair wage settlement is put in place for all public sector workers that reflects the growing cost of living.

Given these pressures something has got to give and that’s why the Green focus on using the tax system in a fairer more progressive way will be at the heart of our discussions in the last few weeks before the final Holyrood budget is set.

Poor quality public services damage us all. But those with the broadest shoulders can and should be expected to pay a little more to protect services.

The draft budget recognised that we can use income tax bands to set rates more appropriate to a person’s circumstances, reducing tax for those on the very lowest incomes while raising it for higher rate earners. That principle was an important win for Greens and we have the chance now to push this further, not to raise money for the sake of it, but to cancel those Stirling Council cuts planned for the next year.

Those with the broadest shoulders can and should be expected to pay a little more