| Comment | I'm not a "nawbag", but it may interest you to know that the rate at which the block grant has been cut is considerably less than the rate at which ScotGov has cut funding for local authorities:
>Figures from the neutral Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) show that between 2013-14 and 2018-19, the Scottish Government’s revenue budget was cut by 2.8 per cent by Westminster.
>But the Scottish Government were even more brutal in their cuts to councils – hammering them with a 7.5 per cent reduction in funding over the same period.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/snp-more-brutal-tories-turbo-17372365
Anyone who has worked in government administration will recognise the pattern:
Funding goes to local authorities via ScotGov. ScotGov itself faces funding cuts. Rather than pass on the impact of those cuts equally, it produces recommendations and analyses which offload a greater share of cuts to local authorities. Because it has the ear of ministers and is situated at the centre of civil power in Scotland, its recommendations are adopted. This is done to avoid redundancies or cuts to ScotGov itself. This isn't dishonesty, simply an unconscious bias among civil servants which is, for obvious reasons, strongly against recommending courses of action which might result in fewer jobs for civil servants. |
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