Today was Finance and Resources Committee at @Edinburgh_CC. 41 items on the agenda and almost 700 pages of reports to get through, so as you might imagine it was a long one! @Alex4Craig_Dudd and I are your green reps on the Committee, and here's a brief 🧵 about what went down:
💰F&R is the 'money committee', and lots of papers related to the precarious situation of council finances. The budget is decided annually in February, but Officers are already doing lots of work to identify how we can meet the rising costs and shrinking budgets.
😱Overall, it's a pretty terrifying picture - we need more money from Scottish Government, and they in turn need more money from Westminster (or, y'know, independence). But the long and short of it is that the council has some seriously tricky questions to grapple with.
🤑Ultimately, we need to figure out how we help people with the cost of living crisis and fulfil our duties as a local authority while at the same time dealing with increased costs, higher demand on services, and unexpected expenses.
💸AND of course still trying to make the huge financial investments needed to tackle the climate crisis, provide warm safe and affordable homes for everyone, and make Edinburgh a decent city to live and work in. But those conversations are for the budget debates next year!
🪫 For today, F&R was looking at reports, including item 7.4 on our financial position 5 months in. When looking at this report, I noticed that Energy for Edinburgh, the council's energy services company, had some planned investment that was at risk of not being completed.
🔋My amendment reaffirmed the importance of this strategic work to investigate local heat and
energy efficiency solutions in helping Edinburgh Council to meet our climate change and energy targets, and called for a report on progress.
🙌 I was pleased that this was unanimously agreed. Energy for Edinburgh seems like a bit of a missed opportunity to have municipal, democratic energy for the city and we need to get moving on a serious options appraisal, especially looking at things like community heating.
🇺🇦 I also had questions for officers on our welcome of Ukrainian people to Edinburgh, getting assurances that while we are negotiating with Scottish and UK Governments about funding, we won't be withholding services from people in, or arriving to, Edinburgh.
🦄And about costs for Operation Unicorn, especially after the papers showed that the public holiday cost the city half a million pounds in addition to all the other costs!
Next up for me was item 7.7 where I also had an amendment,& this paper was a biggie. It set out some of the recommendations from officers about what cuts ("savings") could be made from council budgets in order for us to balance the books. This is where the room got pretty sombre.
✂️Of course the budget is set by councillors and is subject to all sorts of political wrangling, but with an anticipated £76.5m shortfall in 2023/24, clearly some cuts will be made & lots of these recommendations will likely be followed. This report was setting some of these out.
🚲My amendment related to the recommendation to stop investigating options for a bike hire scheme for the city, & release the money we had set aside for this. This is an issue which is raised with me all the time - it's embarrassing that Edinburgh doesn't have a city bike scheme.
🙄(Not to mention contrary to all of our targets around active travel, changes in road use, health and wellbeing and....oh yeah climate change)
Luckily this amendment was also accepted unanimously.
🗒️Although the report was not enacting any of the changes mentioned in it, and was just for 'noting' by the committee, I felt it was important to highlight this potential cut and make it clear that by noting the report, we weren't accepting that recommendation.
🟰 I also raised questions about when we would be seeing Equality Impact Assessments on these proposed cuts. There is no point in having the information about how decisions will impact on certain groups after you have already made the decision!
🗓️We were assured we would have the integrated impact assessments before budget decision time, so we can actually take equality and discrimination into account when we are having these horrible conversations about where to allocate spending.
♻️Lots of reports passed without much to note, but I do want to talk about 7.12 aka The Supply of Five Electric Refuse Collection Vehicles. You'd better believe I was excited. Especially when I read about the 'Dennis The Dustcart' books which go along with them 🚛🚛🚛
🛢️ Of course the tories were very keen to ask about how much more these electric trucks cost than diesel vehicles. Bit my tongue to avoid blurting out "The cost to your children? To the planet?". And instead asked if we could have a competition to name them all. #BinnyMcBinface
🏥Next up for me was item 7.18 about the purchase of Liberton Hospital. This is a really exciting project to allow us to build more affordable housing, but I was a bit concerned about some of the terms of the report.
🧂 The original decision was to buy the site outright, but now the proposal was to lease it back to the NHS on a peppercorn rent for 2 years. I had an amendment to say this should be at market rate, but after officers answered my (many!) questions, I was satisfied & withdrew it.
📈Finally, @Alex4Craig_Dudd had an addendum on item 7.21 which was a referral from the Housing Committee on a motion on Participatory Budgeting by @JackRMCaldwell - the amendment said that that local charities should be included and consulted on projects, and was agreed by all.
👍We also agreed progress on lots of other exciting projects including the Granton Gas Holder, and leases for the Gracemount walled garden to @gracemountcg & Portobello Town Hall to @PortyCentral. As well as approving lots of boring but important things on audits & contracts.
🧐Finance and Resources Committee is an education. Mainly in *always* reading the appendices because you never know what you might find.
📺Hopefully this thread was a helpful insight in what I did today - always happy to answer any questions!
You can even watch the webcast if you want more details, but I can't say with my whole heart that I fully recommend it: edinburgh.public-i.tv/core/portal/we…
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