Revealed: The great town hall betrayal. Humza made big promises

Release time：2024-05-21 13:03:05 Source：Earthly Echo news portal

After a weekend with their paints, the primary school pupils took their campaign to the streets of their town the following Monday.

‘Save our Pam,’ read one of their colourful placards. ‘Keep our lollipop lady,’ urged another.

Protest, it seems, starts at a tender age in Humza Yousaf’s tapped-out Scotland. Beside the under-tens, Pamela Gartshore, soon to be out of a job, kept her usual watchful eye on them as the horns of passing cars blared in support of the cause – which is a lost one.

Along with every other school crossing patroller in Aberdeenshire, Portlethen lollipop lady Ms Gartshore’s services will be dispensed with at the end of the summer term.

A petition to save her and her colleagues sits at just under 4,000 names. But the bottom line is the £436,000 which axing around 15 patrollers’ jobs will save. Besides, says council leader Gillian Owen, ensuring children get to school safely is parents’ responsibility.

Services including libraries, lollipop ladies, swimming lessons, speech therapy and toddler groups are being axed

The red pen taken through valued services does not stop there. Thousands more parents are petitioning to save Aberdeenshire speech therapists’ jobs.

Their loss will have a ‘devastating impact’ on 6,282 children in the area, says Glenn Carter, head of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists in Scotland – and it will prove a false economy.

He was so horrified by the plan to pull funding for this vital resource for struggling children that he travelled to the Aberdeenshire Council budget meeting to make his points to councillors.

His request to speak was denied and the cut was voted through. Total annual saving: £200,000.

But, asks Mr Carter, at what cost to young people? Five-year-olds with poor spoken language are six times less likely to reach expected standards in reading and writing by the age of 11, he says.

Half of children from deprived areas start primary school with under-developed communication skills. Almost 90 per cent of long-term unemployed young men, and 60 per cent of those going through the justice system, have the same difficulty.

In short, ‘life outcomes’ hinge on speech and language therapists seeing children at an early age, but the decision is made.

Some £12,000 of funding for the Riding for the Disabled charity will be pulled. Six janitors will get their jotters, saving £195,000.

Kitchens in smaller schools will be closed, saving £45,000, and catering staff will no longer receive a free lunch. Another £30,000 clawed back.

Park maintenance will be reduced, garden waste collections will be reviewed and, of course, parking charges will soar – by up to 30 per cent – while pay and display zones are extended.

In all, the slashing session lasted just under four hours. SNP councillor Ross Cassie described the budget meeting as the ‘annual salami slicing fest’.

Aberdeenshire is, of course, just one of Scotland’s local authorities. In the 31 others, similar exercises have been held, many resulting in bloodbaths for services.

Such are the realities, argue councillors, when the First Minister drops the bombshell that council tax rates across Scotland are to be frozen.

It is only in recent days that every council has agreed to be bound by the freeze announced on the hoof by Mr Yousaf last autumn.

Rebel authorities such as Argyll and Bute and Inverclyde were pulled into line only when extra funding was added to the £147million the Scottish Government is already paying to finance the freeze.

The extra funds amounted to £62.7million but not a penny of either sum would be seen by local authorities putting up council tax.

The upshot is council tax bills remain static while ministers argue they have financed the equivalent of a 7 per cent increase.

In many council service users’ minds, the bar was already set unacceptably low. Thousands of pothole-ridden roads would never pass an MoT, even if the cars using them must.

Bin collections have been pared back and, in some parts, park maintenance all but abandoned. A few councils now imaginatively suggest this is their contribution to rewilding.

Some might have supposed local authorities’ financial circumstances could not be too desperate if they could afford to pay so many staff six-figure salaries.

The number earning more than £100,000 in Glasgow has doubled to 42 in the past year, according to the Town Hall Rich List, published this week.

The highest bonus across all UK local authorities – £72,280 – was paid to Marshall Dallas, chief executive of Edinburgh International Conference Centre, a City of Edinburgh Council subsidiary. That took his package for the year to £230,991, some £63,000 more than the Prime Minister earns.

And yet, as a Scottish Daily Mail investigation has found, Mr Yousaf’s freeze has sent more services into freefall while punitive measures are unleashed on motorists and households generating waste.

In Glasgow, for example, a consultancy firm has been appointed to draw up plans for Scotland’s first workplace parking levy, which will impose charges of up to £650 a year on employees driving to their job.

In Falkirk, parking charges will increase by 30 per cent while the 30-minute rate will double from 50p to £1.

In Aberdeen, penalties for driving through one of the deeply unpopular bus gates – widely claimed to be strangling city centre trade – will rise from £60 to £100.

Several councils, including East Lothian, are introducing a charge for the collection of garden waste, while others which already charge will demand more – in Falkirk’s case more than double.

Yet it is the removal of services aimed at the young, the elderly, the disadvantaged and the community-minded which has proved the bitterest pill.

In Stirling, the long-established swimming lessons for all primary five children will cease, saving £50,000.

Around 900 children benefit from it every year. Of all the 43 proposed cuts in the council’s budget, this one proved the least popular, with almost 75 per cent of online respondents against it.

Councillor Margaret Brisley, the Labour administration’s children and young people convener, said: ‘Unfortunately, the position the budget was in, we had to.’

She said non-swimmers could learn in secondary school instead. Independent councillor Alasdair Macpherson described it as ‘an attack on vulnerable people’.

Over in Perth, more protests – this time over swingeing cuts to Perth and Kinross Instrumental Music Services (IMS) which offered free tuition for pupils and the chance to play in ensembles and orchestras.

The council voted to axe the equivalent of 3.5 full-time salaries.

The decision brought yet more protesting youngsters to the streets as, musical instruments in hand, they demonstrated outside Perth Museum a fortnight ago.

Among the countless musicians who have benefited immeasurably from the service is 25-year-old tuba player Jamie Carstairs, who has Down’s syndrome.

His mother Sarah said: ‘Music has been such an important part of Jamie’s life, and that is all down to the amazing staff in the IMS. I can’t bear to think what his life would have been like without this.’

Spending on instrumental tuition is also being reduced in East Lothian, West Lothian and North Lanarkshire – but it is for a different cost-cutting measure that the last of those three has hit the headlines.

Its Club 365 programme was the first and most comprehensive of its kind when it was rolled out in 2018 to provide food and activities during holiday periods for children entitled to free school meals.

By this Easter it was gone, after its council funding allocation of £1.1million was removed in February. In South Lanarkshire, meanwhile, a raft of community hall and library closures were voted through.

The council’s leisure and culture service is withdrawing funding for 35 facilities – essentially washing its hands of them and saying communities can run them if they want to.

This has resulted in a massive splurge of halls, libraries, parks and pitches being offered for ‘community asset transfer’, throwing the future of hundreds of groups who use them into doubt.

The ABC Tiny Tots toddler group has been based in Greenhills Community Hall in East Kilbride for more than 40 years.

‘It’s just devastating,’ Maureen Dynes, who runs it, told her local paper.

‘I have no idea what’s going to happen and no idea where we’re going to go as there are no halls left.’ Inevitably, the political blame game is in full swing.

While the council leader, Labour’s Joe Fagan, said the ‘truly awful and painful decisions’ were forced on it by Holyrood, Hamilton MSP and Scottish Government minister Christina McKelvie said it was ‘not remotely realistic’ for the council to offload 35 community spaces onto residents in the space of a year.

Clackmannanshire is offloading halls too. Funding is being withdrawn from Clackmannan Town Hall, Coalsnaughton Village Hall and Devonvale Hall, although a decision on axing libraries has been postponed until next year.

‘In many communities where halls have been closed before, the community has come forward and taken them on,’ said council leader Ellen Forson.

While it is the young who have borne the brunt of the cuts in many councils – where spending on education represents more than 50 per cent of their annual outlay – Scotland’s elderly face multiple blows too.

In Falkirk, the handyman service, which was available to the over-60s and disabled for repairs in their households, was stopped at the end of last month, saving £20,000 annually.

In Renfrewshire, an entire care home is going. Almost £400,000 will be removed from the council’s outgoings with the closure of Montrose Care Home in Paisley and, despite another public protest and another petition, the decision is made.

‘My view on it is they are evicting my mother from her home,’ said Deborah Stafford as she prepared to break the news to 90-year-old Joyce McMenemy, who has dementia.

‘It’s her safe place, it’s where she knows, and for us now to have to uproot her and move to one of the other care facilities is going to be devastating.’

Shannon Fennelly, a social care assistant at the home, was similarly appalled.

She said: ‘They’ve worked their whole lives to live comfortably in retirement and to be safe and protected. And now through no fault of their own they’ve lost their homes.’

Another council area, another protest. This time in Church Street, Dumbarton, as campaigners gathered to oppose a £62,000 cut in funding for the Ben View Centre charity which supports vulnerable children, the elderly and the disabled.

And, this time, a partial success. West Dunbartonshire has agreed to halve the funding cut to £31,000 to keep the charity viable while it seeks alternative funding.

Over at the town’s Crosslet House care home, beds are being cut, with all 11 residents on the first floor being told to move to the ground level or move out.

The same council has also pulled its £14,000 funding for the Loch Lomond Highland Games, which attracts 9,000 visitors to the area every year. 

The July event has been going since 1967 and is recognised as one of the top three Highland games in Scotland. In 2024 it is off.

In Stirling, Hogmanay plans are cancelled while funding for the annual Open Streets festival has been removed.

Next door in Falkirk, meanwhile, independent councillor Ann Ritchie can scarcely believe funding for the annual fireworks display in Callendar Park has not been removed – especially when cremation and burial charges are rising by up to 30 per cent.

She said: ‘What a waste of money! At a time when it’s cut, cut, cut!’

Of course, not all council tax bills are frozen.

Of Scotland’s 32 councils, 29 will double council tax for second home owners after powers to do so came in on April 1. Only Falkirk, Glasgow and North Ayrshire have declined to introduce the hike for Scotland’s 24,000 holiday homes.

For authorities such as Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, which covers the Outer Hebrides, the measure will bring in only around £800,000 extra, despite 6 per cent of its residential properties being holiday homes.

Set against the ‘black holes’ in budgets many local authorities speak of, it is relatively small beer.

Humza Yousaf claimed his council tax freeze was fully funded

Even after the most savage cuts in living memory and some of the most brutal price hikes, councils have had to dip into their reserve funds to balance books.

It’s a move Inverclyde Council leader Stephen McCabe described as ‘unsustainable’, and one which ‘will lead to a cliff edge for many in the next one to three years’.

He told the Daily Record: ‘While Scotland’s councils are under a legal duty to set a balanced budget, it’s increasingly likely that in the years ahead many councillors will not have the appetite for making the level of cuts required to achieve this. We may just walk away and let the Scottish Government send in commissioners to do their dirty work.’

Few can say whether Mr Yousaf was fully aware of the chill winds his promise to freeze council tax would send through the nation’s town halls.

But many would surely argue that, for those heavily reliant on council services, they feel frighteningly close to austerity.

Back in Aberdeenshire, consideration is being given to recruiting volunteer lollipop people – community-spirited folk prepared to do for free the work the council once paid people for.

Questions arise. Is this the model for the future?

Why, when councils insist they are having to spend more and more, does it seem to so many that they are prepared to do less and less?

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