One could be forgiven for thinking that the general outlook for Council services is pretty grim. Funding has been squeezed by the governments at Westminster and Holyrood with little prospect of the situation improving or additional sources of revenue provided.

In Edinburgh the Council’s revenue budget is roughly £1bn a year. However, the current SNP/LibDem coalition, who have run the city for the past 5 years, have managed to increase the Council’s debt to an unprecedented £1.5bn. This debt currently costs about £110m a year to service, about 11% of the Council’s budget.

When last year’s budget was set we were pleased to receive support from the other opposition Conservative and Green Groups on the Council. Whether that will be repeated this year remains to be seen but we will again share our thoughts ahead of Budget Day on 9th February in the hope of achieving some consensus.

Setting budgets is never easy although the mantra of attempting to protect front line services as much as possible appears to have been universally adopted.

But we will go further with our budget plans, using them to articulate the ideas that we think will make the city stronger and fairer.

The Alternative Business Models (ABM) programme – otherwise known as privatisation - that would have seen large swathes of Council services signed over to private companies on 7 year contracts is now dead. The non-ABM in-house options that will improve services and deliver savings require investment and our budget will provide that investment.

In addition, Edinburgh Labour believes we can still be ambitious and imaginative for our city and the time has come for new thinking. Co-operative models are now being developed to good effect throughout the UK and the time is right to bring together citizens, tax payers, communities and workers to establish new methods of service delivery that empowers people to do what they think is best for their community, with Council support, rather than the Council adopting a “we know best” approach. To that end we will establish a Co-operative Development Unit that will develop and support co-operative models of service delivery.

We also believe that it’s important for us all to remain as active as possible and many do this through Edinburgh Leisure but recent budget cuts have forced EL to increase prices and close facilities. We want to reinvest in sports facilities and will make provision for this. Libraries too, play an important role in our communities and we want to reverse recent cuts that will lead to reduced opening hours.

We will also introduce the Living Wage for Council workers bringing much needed social and economic justice to some of the lowest paid people in Edinburgh. This will be linked to a new policy that will ensure that the highest paid Council employee earns no more than 12 times more than the lowest paid worker.

We will also allocate additional sums to local Neighbourhood Partnerships, allowing local people to decide how it should be best spent, repairing roads or pavements perhaps, or cycling initiatives, or the local playpark or community centre or ….. whatever they think is most needed in their community.

Finally, but importantly in these challenging times we will invest in employment initiatives helping unemployed people to increase their chances of getting a job and we will further invest in creating apprenticeships so that more young people can benefit from this opportunity.

As stated above, setting the Council’s budget is never easy but now, more than ever, Edinburgh Council can take a lead in making the city a better place to live and Edinburgh Labour will continue to argue for the implementation of the plans I have laid out and that will feature in our budget motion on 9th February.

Written by Councillor Ricky Henderson. Councillor Henderson is the Labour Group Finance Spokesman.

Councillor Henderson has his own blog. You can find it here.