Scottish Budget: Increasing parking charges and leaving jobs unfilled among options considered by Edinburgh City Council

Edinburgh is one of a swatch of Scottish councils that will struggle to balance their budgets

Increasing parking charges, using up reserves and leaving hundreds of jobs unfilled are among the options being mulled by Edinburgh City Council bosses in a bid to “protect frontline services”.

Speaking ahead of a “difficult” budget next month, council leader Cammy Day said he wanted to be “blunt and honest” with people about the decisions being faced to plug a funding gap of around £20 million.

He warned whilst his priority was to shield funding for action on poverty, net zero and to “get basic services right”, that “every service across the council” would experience “some level of cuts” to address the organisation’s financial challenges in the year ahead.

An parking machine in Edinburgh. City council leader Cammy Day has said parking fees could go up to bridge a budget gap. Picture: Scott Louden

“When we’re getting £10m-20m of cuts, something has to go somewhere,” he said. And things are likely to get much worse before they get better – as he revealed a “worst-case scenario” could see the authority’s financial black hole grow to £200m in the next five years.

But he played down any immediate concerns about ‘effective bankruptcy’, as has been increasingly declared by councils in England unable to meet their legal duty to set a balanced budget.

Cllr Day said the Scottish Government should “recognise” his cash-strapped council was the lowest funded in the country per-head by giving it more funding and freedom to spend it how it likes, with less cash ring-fenced.

Council bosses are proposing slashing £8.2m from city schools to help bridge the gap. However, Cllr Day said he was “not convinced” his administration and fellow councillors across the chamber would approve the full cut to the already-stretched education budget.

The Labour city leader said potential measures to balance the books included raising parking charges – just a year after drivers were hit with a 20 per cent hike. Increases to fees and charges across the council will generate some additional income, having brought in an estimated £1.19m in 2023/24.

A “big chunk” of the budget’s overall gap, which sits at around £50m before various mitigations are factored in, will be filled by reducing contributions to the council’s pension pot.

In addition the council “deliberately won’t fill vacancies” to save money. “We’ve got a few hundred vacancies and they just won’t get filled as quickly,” Cllr Day said. “But that for me is still a cut.”

Money from the city’s Covid recovery fund and general council reserves – but “not a lot” from the latter – will also be eaten into.

“All these things are being looked at to try and protect front-line services,” Cllr Day said. “But I don’t want to pretend that year on year we’ve not cut things. Every year we do because we’re underfunded by the Scottish Government.”

Reflecting on events south of the border where a number of local authorities have declared effective bankruptcy due to dire financial positions, Cllr Day said: “The public sector is not in a good place.

“We’ve seen what happened in Birmingham, Nottingham and some other authorities down south where chief officers have told them they are now effectively not a going concern.”

Councillors will meet to set the 2024/25 budget on February 22.