The political battle as Fife Council seeks ways to balance the books shows no signs of letting up after the region’s Labour and SNP groups challenged each other to publish final budget proposals.
Fresh from comparing Deputy First Minister John Swinney to a “Chicago gangster”, council leader David Ross called on Councillor Brian Goodall, leader of Fife’s SNP group, to publish the opposition’s alternative budget in advance of the budget setting meeting on February 25.
Mr Ross argued that it would allow “some level of advance scrutiny” as has been the case with the Labour administration’s draft budget in recent weeks.
But the SNP’s finance spokesman, David Alexander, has hit back, once more accusing Labour of overstating the financial situation in Fife and calling on Mr Ross to publish his finalised budget proposals.
The budget had been due to be set yesterday, but Fife postponed it by a fortnight to look at further options with councillors faced with meeting a £91 million shortfall over the next three years.
“Since Mr Alexander is on record as saying there was no need to postpone the council’s budget meeting to take account of changes to John Swinney’s grant offer to councils, clearly the SNP must have prepared their alternative budget already,” Mr Ross said, calling on Mr Goodall to publish the SNP proposals.
“I had hoped we could reach some measure of cross-party agreement on the budget, given the difficult financial position the council faces.
“I have already had helpful conversations with the Liberal Democrat and Conservative groups and a number of Independent councillors and would still welcome a discussion with the SNP.
“However, my door remains open.”
But Mr Alexander said if it had not been for the actions of Westminster and Labour, the current settlement could have been viewed as “reasonably good” for Fife.
And in response to Mr Ross, he added: “We’re only going to get his final budget five minutes before the meeting starts, so he needs to put his final budget out to the people now because the draft budget never equates to what’s in the final budget. The delay has given us more time to do more analysis and Labour are trying to con everybody they are over-egging the situation.
“The problem with this scaremongering is the report that Fife Council have managed to gather sufficient resources from this current financial year to pay over £50 million of historic equal pay claims.
“You do not need to be a financial genius to realise that if this equal pay claim was not in the way the existing resources used to cover it are also available to swamp the budget gap that David Ross is saying exists.
“So it really is time Labour held their hands up, apologise to the people of Fife for their inept stewardship of Fife, and also apologise to John Swinney for the slurs on his handling of the settlement.”