Opposition councillors are warning inflation will lead to ”significant cuts” in Dundee City Council’s budget up to 2015.
Labour group leader Kevin Keenan said the Scottish Government is ”demanding the impossible” from local authorities in order to meet the SNP’s pledge to freeze council tax.
The amount the council receives in grant from the government will fall slightly in 2012-13 to £316.4 million, with allocations for the following two years expected to be £318 million and £318.2 million.
Mr Keenan and his colleagues have used Treasury statistics to work out what these sums will be worth in real terms once inflation is taken into account. They reckon next year’s grant will be worth only £308 million, dropping to £302 million the following year and to £294 million in 2014-15.
Mr Keenan said: ”These figures show how unfairly councils have been treated by the Scottish Government to pay for its five-year council tax freeze that it has never fully funded.
”The Scottish Government is demanding the impossible from councils. It orders councils to maintain vital public services while slashing their budgets with deep cuts at the same time.
”For its loyal council supporters to suggest otherwise is to misrepresent the position of councils that through no fault of their own have been forced to carry out cuts to their important services.”
The city council’s SNP administration has already said it will be seeking savings of £3.4 million in next year’s budget, taking into account its £1.4 million drop in central government grant and its need to maintain council tax levels.
Liberal Democrat group leader Fraser Macpherson said: ”The SNP continually blames Westminster for everything, but the reality is that the SNP finance cabinet secretary John Swinney has a budget that is in real terms billions higher than that available to the Scottish Government when the parliament was first established in 1999.”
Mr Swinney has welcomed confirmation that Dundee and the other 31 councils in Scotland have agreed to accept his funding offer for 2012-13, which commits them to freezing council tax for another year and maintaining police and teacher numbers.
He said a household on the average council tax band will have saved more than £500 by the end of the next financial year as a result, with poorest households gaining most.
Mr Swinney said: ”Despite the most dramatic reduction in public spending ever imposed on Scotland by the UK Government, over the next three years local government will receive a larger share of Scottish Government funds than in 2007-08.
”Like the Scottish Government, councils face a number of competing pressures on their budgets, so I am delighted the package I offered to local authorities has been accepted in principle by every council.
”This will see the council tax freeze continue for another year, putting over £500 into the pockets of hard-pressed households since 2008, while maintaining teacher numbers and the number of police officers on our streets benefiting every household in Scotland.”
Government figures show that Dundee City Council will see its grant increase by only 0.16% between now and 2014-15, one of the smallest rises of any local authority. The grant for Angus will increase by only 0.32%. Fife does better with a 1.57% increase over that period and Perth and Kinross will see its grant rise by 1.97%.
However, the impact of inflation means all these councils are facing real-terms cuts, putting pressure on jobs and services.