Not everybody realises it but local councils provide so many of the essential services we rely on every day.
They run our schools. They handle planning applications. They fix potholes on our roads. They take away the bins. They help businesses to grow.
That’s why it’s so important that local councils get the funds they need. If they don’t, vital local services will be reduced or in some cases, shut down entirely.
Since I became the Deputy Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Local Government, people have been asking me - how are councils in Scotland are funded
Some people are not fully aware that the vast majority of local authority funding comes from the Scottish Government.
They provide around 85% of council’s net revenue expenditure, with the rest coming mostly from local taxation.
So when your local services don’t get the funding they need, the blame lies solely with the SNP.
They cut local council budgets - and local services suffer.
And the SNP have cut local budgets to the bone.
Council funding is lower now than in 2009.
The amount of the Scottish Budget that goes to local councils has plummeted since 2016.
While the Scottish Government has gone up by 8.3 per cent since 2014, the local council budget has increased by barely half of that.
So often, the SNP pass the buck onto councils by forcing them to make the difficult decisions about which services to cut or which taxes to raise.
Every year, they provide councils with an inadequate amount of funding then insist that they provide even more services and criticise them when they can’t.
Over the years a growing proportion of funding allocations from the Scottish Government to local authorities are ring-fenced. This means that some funds can only be used to deliver on the Scottish Government’s agenda, as opposed to the needs and priorities of the local area.
I know the pressure on local government. I’ve seen how councils operate from the inside and out.
I’ve had experience of working with councils as a businesswoman - and I worked at a senior level in council leadership teams for nearly two decades in Scotland and England.
I’ll be using all my real life experience to hold the SNP to account and to demand better local services across Scotland.
Using all my experience, I can see clearly that, while some councils could improve how they operate, the core problems are the SNP’s council cuts and its excessive say over how local authorities should spend their money .
In my new role as Local Government spokeswoman for the Scottish Conservatives, and as a new member of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, I’ll be holding the SNP to account for these disgraceful cuts to vital local services.
In a drastic u-turn the SNP have announced they will exercise less controls over councils; which is timely. After leaving councils with funding blackholes and forcing them to make cuts to vital services more autonomy for councils is the perfect excuse for the SNP to dodge responsibility.
However, I will not let the SNP simply blame local councils and force them to make the tough choices, such as raising council tax to make up for the SNP budget cuts.
This year, a consultation from the government suggests the SNP want to raise council tax by as much as 22.5 per cent.
That could see bills put up by as much as £834.
Hundreds of thousands of households would be forced to pay hundreds of pounds more each year.
In a cost-of-living crisis, it’s totally unacceptable to hit working people so hard.
They should not pay the price for the SNP’s failures.
In my new role, I will be standing up strongly for all those hardworking families who deserve better from the SNP.
