'2017/18 Budget' Council Meeting - Thursday 9th February

As mentioned during last week, this coming Thursday (9th February) is the '2017/18 Budget' Council Meeting - and, as usual, we published our final Draft Coalition Budget Motion, a week prior to the meeting: you can still read it in full here ...

... the actual meeting starts at 10am on Thursday, and all of the detailed reports are now up on Committee Papers On-Line (CPOL), and you can access the main agenda directly here; and each of the individual reports separately via this link.

And, of course, if you're so minded - you can watch all the proceedings live here and/or the meeting will be archived a few hours after it finishes.

There's been a significant amount of speculation about the last-minute changes to the Draft Scottish Government Budget, as debated in Holyrood at the end of last week ...

... well - to be completely factual about all of this; please do check out paragraph 3.4 of this 'Revenue Budget Framework' report, which is going to the Council Meeting on Thursday. As you'll read - that paragraph makes it abundantly clear that the City of Edinburgh Council was about to receive some £37.1million less in revenue this year from the Scottish Government, than we received last year.

That's why I branded that draft settlement the worst since devolution - and, I was careful to acknowledge in that blogpost that the figures were indeed draft and may change ...

... well, the draft figures have now changed - and the revenue reduction we're now receiving from the Scottish Government is £27.1million this year, in comparison to last year.

Of course, I welcome that change - but let's be clear ...

... this is still the worst settlement since devolution, and those MSPs who voted through Stage 1 of the Scottish Budget at Holyrood last week were approving a year-on-year reduction of £27.1million in revenue for the City of Edinburgh Council.

No amount of spin can hide that rather depressing statement of fact.