Reverse cuts to essential services
As this is my first Wishaw Press article since being re-elected as the MSP for Airdrie and Shotts I should like to thank all those people who voted for me in Shotts and the surrounding area.
To those people who didn’t vote for me I state categorically that I am the MSP for ALL the people living in Airdrie and Shotts.
Whether you voted for me or not I will do my best to serve you and everyone else in our community, irrespective of your political allegiance.
My first priority is to try to get North Lanarkshire Council’s cuts to essential services reversed.
Whilst there is no doubt that every public body, including councils, are facing a difficult time financially, the cuts being made in North Lanarkshire are to the wrong things.
We should not be cutting education budgets.
Our children are our future. Our top priority must be to keep up levels of investment in our nurseries, schools and lifelong learning, so that every child and teenager gets the best possible start in life.
Similarly we need to protect social care budgets so that the most vulnerable in our community, including the disabled and the elderly, don’t suffer.
Cutting home care services, for example, is a false economy which leads to increased spending on the NHS.
The Scottish Government’s reduction in subsidy for North Lanarkshire is less than 1% of the total budget.
There is plenty of waste that can be cut out of council spending without impacting on education or social care. As the housing budget is already ring-fenced, it shouldn’t be affected by these cuts either.
Examples of wasted spending include the council’s totally unnecessary duplication of the work of the national Schools Inspectorate, millions wasted on paying massive fees to lawyers to fight court cases that can be avoided in relation to planning, the refusal until last week to settle equal pay claims, and the endless re-organisation of management structures without any improvement in performance.
Millions of pounds for new investment could be generated by selling off land the council owns but doesn’t need, selling off office and factory buildings which cost a fortune to maintain, tightening up on its procurement procedures and localising the delivery of services for places like Shotts instead of centralising everything in Motherwell.