15 April 2011
The head of Scotland’s local authorities today unleashed a scathing attack on political party leaders, accusing them of treating council services and jobs as ammunition for the Holyrood election battle.
Pat Watters, president of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, told Public Finance: ‘A lot of our national politicians appear to have got their timing wrong.
‘The local government elections aren’t until 2012, but they seem more interested in this campaign in marketing themselves on the basis of what should happen in local government than in focusing on the areas for which they are directly responsible.’
Responding to the ScottishNational Party manifesto, published yesterday, which promised to extend the current council tax freeze for a further five years, Watters said pointedly: ‘National politicians cannot freeze the council tax. Only Scotland’s 32 local authorities can do that.’
But the row crosses party boundaries and reflects a growing resentment on the part of the Cosla leadership at the way this election campaign has developed. Earlier, Watters emerged from a week of Cosla-hosted hustings, organised by Holyrood magazine, to accuse the parties of feeding the voters nothing but ‘political junk food’.
He said: ‘At the same time, they have made it clear that they want to gorge themselves on our services. What is being offered to the electorate is a fairly uninspiring menu that poses a threat to local government services which we cannot allow.’
This refers to plans for service rationalisation. There is broad agreement in favour of merging local social work budgets with the national health budget, cutting the number of health boards, and reducing the current eight fire services and eight police forces to one of each.
Labour in particular has nailed its colours to the idea of a single national fire service and a single national police force, replacing the current municipal-led boards. Although the SNP also favours a single fire service, its manifesto doesn’t specify a number of police authorities, but the accompanying costings imply three or four.
Cosla sees these plans as examples of an alarmingly centralist trend, and has struck back with a manifesto of its own, Positively local, which argues that structural reform must engage the whole of the public sector, not simply seek savings at the expense of local accountability.
