£28m cut from Highland Council budget for year ahead
Highland Councillors have agreed £28million-worth of cuts to the budget for the year ahead.
Highland Councillors have agreed £28million-worth of cuts to the budget for the year ahead.
The agreement came after a meeting which started this morning and finished late afternoon.
The meeting of the full council ended with a £555million budget for 2016/17.
Also agreed to was the SNP’s proposals for alternative savings of £1.3million achieved from changing the council’s policy on staff sick absence, and the introduction of energy initiatives in Highlands schools.
Leader of the Council, Councillor Margaret Davidson said: "We have done everything in our power to minimise the impact of these cuts on communities across the Highlands. We have worked really hard with officers and with colleagues to protect education, roads and winter maintenance which are the areas which people have been most concerned about.
"Over £23million of these budget pressures have been externally imposed on us. The funding package from the Scottish Government represents an £18.334million reduction on 2015/16 which equates to over four per cent cut in external funding.
This leaves a budget gap of £39.856million which includes national NIC and teacher pension pressures, over which we have no control. Taking into account the savings which were agreed by Council in December 2014, the remaining budget gap of £29.671 million had to be found by savings across all services.
"A large proportion of these savings come from cuts to staff through voluntary redundancy and we are very aware of the potential impact this will have on our remaining staff. Whilst no one wants to see cuts of any scale, everyone understands that we have had very little room to manoeuvre and some of the choices we may have had, have been taken away from us. We will certainly see a consequential reduction in our capacity, however we have managed to balance the budget without completely cutting services."