Highland Council has to close a £49 million budget gap in what is being described as “unprecedented times”.
To do that, the leaders say nothing is off the table.
The budget proposals will go before councillors on March 2. There’s some good news in the form of investments, but also some cuts that could hit the most vulnerable people in the Highlands.
Other savings proposals involve major redesigns and millions of pounds saved – but the council can’t yet say what the impact will be.
There’s a lot to unpack in the 175-page paper. Here’s our take on the good, the bad and the ugly of the Highland Council budget.
The good
Yes, there is some good news. First up, while it might hit our pockets, the council tax rise is actually quite modest. At 4%, it’s below inflation and equal with Aberdeenshire as the lowest increase in Scotland. By comparison, Orkney Council is hiking its tax by 10%.
Then there’s the roads. With 39% of Highland roads in need of repair, feeling among the general public is that the roads can’t take any more cuts. It seems the administration agrees. They’re investing an extra £20 million on repairs and creating a ‘rapid road repair team‘ to tackle the potholes. It’s well short of the £195 million total repair bill for Highland roads, but at least it’s not a cut.
There ae big changes for our bin collections too. The council is bidding for £6.5 million from the Scottish Government to expand food recycling beyond Inverness. We will soon have two bins for separating recycling, though waste bin sizes will reduce in size. The council is also investing £1 million into waste to energy plants.
Then there’s an increase in fees paid to foster carers, kinship carers and adoptive parents, plus a £500,000 investment in improving access to council services.
The bad
With £49 million to save, you’d expect there to be plenty of bad news. The council is taking £23 million out of its reserves, which takes some of the sting out of the cuts. It does however mean that it’s looking pretty broke in the long term.
The council also looks set to shed 500 jobs, and more, over the course of the next few years.
Several of the savings proposals might be considered ‘bad’ purely because they sound somewhat half-baked. Highland Council has identified a £1.5 million saving in early learning and childcare centres, based on the fact that the Highlands has a declining population.
It’s also banking on saving £2.4 million from a health and social care redesign. The logic there, is that targeting the services towards early intervention will save £2.4 million in services down the line. How that figure was calculated is not explained in the budget papers.
That’s nearly £4 million removed from childcare, social work, and social care – but the council report says “the impact is not known at this point”.
Councillors may question how they can vote for that level of cut without knowing what effect it will have.
There are also some changes to frontline public services. This includes increased charges for car parking and reducing cleaning of council buildings to three days a week.
In a somewhat optimistic move, the council also hopes to save £150,000 by getting children to break their Chromebook laptops less often.
The ugly
Many of the council’s savings proposals will impact on vulnerable groups.
Having funded successful pilot projects in Caithness and Lochaber, Highland Council is now looking to remove half a million pounds from community mental health and wellbeing services. They say this is because they have built capacity in the community, reducing demand on council services.
The council is planning to remove £90,000 of grant funding to a range of early years services across the Highlands. This will affect organisations including SNAP in Inverness and FCSS, which both provide respite for children with additional support needs. Then there’s Toybox nursery in Gairloch, Allsorts after school club in Dornoch, Fas Mor in Skye and the Pulteneytown People’s Project in Wick. They all face deep cuts.
The council report lists a number of risks in these cuts, including: a reduction in care for children with ASL, socioeconomic impact on low income families, no alternative provision for children under two, impact on a rural island communities, and disproportionate impact on women, who make up most of that workforce.
There’s another £95,000 in cuts targeted at ‘legacy funding’, which will remove funding for village halls. And £107,000 from arts, music and sports charities across the Highlands.
Schools will struggle too. Pupil equity funding will reduce by £775,000. The much-touted Highland Virtual Academy will see a cut of £600,000. And the council hopes to save half a million by mothballing schools with declining pupil numbers.
It’s a tough package of savings to stomach, though the council has sought to avoid redundancies and dip into its reserves to ease the burden.
The revenue budget is up for debate on March 2.
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