Cammy Day outlines Labour budget proposals 14-02-24
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00:00 In Edinburgh we are regrettably having to accept the £16 million compensation and have a council
00:06 tax freeze for the city of Welsh. That I'm sure is welcome for some people, it also means that
00:10 that £16 million is not available to spend on frontline services as we would have wished.
00:15 The government has imposed that freeze on us and if the money is there we would rather have had that
00:18 money and then spent the £16 million compensation and a small council tax rise on frontline public
00:25 services. So we're having to save the remainder of the budget by re-looking at our contract spend
00:29 and our agency spend and to reduce that by a few million pounds to top up the remainder of the
00:34 cuts and we will slow down the recruitment of some of the positions that we've got vacant in
00:39 the council to save some money going forward. I suppose where we have managed to find some money
00:43 to spend as well we will spend over £12.5 million in continuing that investment in roads and
00:48 pavements and cycles and pathways for people to enjoy getting around the city as we've done for
00:53 the last year. It's the biggest spend we've made to improve road conditions across and pavements
00:58 across the city and we'll continue to invest in that. We'll increase the about £2 million into
01:03 homelessness services to accommodate the growing number of people who are becoming homeless who
01:07 can come to Edinburgh and demand homelessness services. Again a service that is underfunded
01:13 by the Scottish Government. We'll continue to prioritise net zero and put a new team of staff
01:19 or a continued number of staff to deliver the net zero agenda with us and I think it's really
01:24 important for the city that we make a real impact on net zero to get to 2030. We'll put aside £100,000
01:31 to help the projects who didn't receive funding through the connected community grants to make
01:37 sure that no project adversely suffers through that and we'll also allocate some money to the
01:42 big house project which people might know that Gordon Brown was involved in across in Fife
01:46 and that should release somewhere around £2 million worth of investment into people who
01:50 are homeless and need support here in Edinburgh. So we're really keen to do some of these things
01:54 and the next few days we'll be negotiating with other political parties to see who we can bring
01:59 on side to support the administration's budget and of course that will come at a cost of some
02:04 of the priorities that they want to fund which will no doubt mean that the council has got to dip into
02:08 reserves this year to deliver some of these services and I hope that the message goes out
02:14 to the public that we need their support to have continued increases in council tax funding
02:20 and maybe more importantly that they get behind the city's campaign to ask for fairer funding for
02:25 the capital city from the Scottish Government and I see that as the lowest funded council
02:29 the capital city of Scotland the lowest funded council in Scotland.