Thursday, June 23, 2011

Council debt stands at £1.3billion and growing

Audit Committee earlier today did actually throw up one important clarification about current Council debt levels - its all buried within the Unaudited Financial Statement for 2010/11 ...

... City of Edinburgh Council currently has almost £1.3billion of debt - yes, that's billion
... which is eating up over £100million EVERY year to service
... that's some 10% of the existing revenue budget servicing Council debt

That's right - 10% of the day-to-day budget of the City of Edinburgh Council is being spent on servicing debt and not directly on delivering services.

Pretty shocking really - I'm frankly amazed more attention isn't being paid to this issue?

4 comments:

John Knox said...

£1.3 Billion......hmmmm.....

Lets not forget about the public pension short fall of £450 million

Lets not forget the cost of the Tram systems PLUS the cost to keep the tram system going.

Plus the 4.8 trillion of UK government debt which LABOUR has piled up over the years.

This 1.3 billion you talk about is only the tip of the ice berg and the worse then about it is your party just wants spend spend spend spend as if there is no tomorrow.

Andrew said...

jgw2001

Thanks for the comment.

Take your point about debt - but I'm a local (not national) politician and its a fact that Edinburgh Council debt has gone from around £900K in early 2007 to (now in late 2011) over £1.5bn.

Thanks for checking the blog.

Andrew

Anonymous said...

How did the debt increase so dramatically from 2007? Surely not the trams?
Thank You.

Andrew said...

Anonymous - thanks for the comment ... that post is from 2011; but no, the tram-incurred debt of the time was £231million, which doesn't account for the overall dramatic rise of over some £600million.

Thanks for checking the blog; Andrew.