IT’S the middle of winter, days are short and cold and it is therefore time, I am afraid, to have a serious conversation about council finances.

All Scottish local authorities will soon have to set their budget, a legally mandated process for all devolved institutions. There is a deadline to complete this process which is difficult to achieve, particularly as we had frequent delays in receiving our budget notification from the Scottish Government.

To be clear, this was not a delay in Edinburgh. Instead Westminster, thrown into chaos by the disastrous Autumn budget of Tory PM Liz Truss, the mad scramble to replace the clueless UK Chancellor, the time taken to address the £45 billion hole in the UK’s finances caused by that single act, the appointment by the Tory party of their third PM in less than two months and the subsequent delay in announcing yet another new budget, caused a massive delay in confirming the, reduced, budget for the devolved Scottish Government.

Clearly we cannot wait for the Tory Government to get their act together before starting to plan. It is therefore important for us to understand the difference between required spending, that which is legally required for services such as education, and discretionary spending. From there we can create options for possible future budgets. As these options are unconfirmed it is essential that these budget options are kept private.

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Unfortunately they were not. Confidential options papers were deliberately released by councillors who have no interest in properly running the council, or protecting vulnerable staff, or service users that may be affected. Instead their only agenda is to protest rather than propose, decry rather than debate, and confront rather than compromise.

For them a win is not the provision of the best possible services for our residents but the creation of a sensationalist headline.

While this has been going on more sensible councillors have continued with the slow, methodical and painstaking task of combing the budget line by line to ensure that we provide the best services possible for all our residents. This is not an easy task. The council has two budgets, revenue and capital. The revenue budget pays for day to day spending on salaries, materials, energy and so on. This was roughly £363 million last year. In addition we had a capital budget of roughly £410 million that goes towards projects such as the new Ardrossan school and leisure facilities and the regeneration of the Harbour and the town centre. I can assure you that that sort of money generates a lot of detail.

The problem is, of course, that within our fixed budget every call for an increase in spending on one area leads to a reduction elsewhere. It is therefore incumbent on all councillors to measure the competing priorities and create a balanced budget.

Finally we will present our budget at a special meeting of the council. Unlike some previous administrations we will not pretend that this is some sort of nebulous “Officers’ budget” for which the administration has no responsibility. It will be the best budget that we can create and will be recommended to the whole council on that basis. The challenge for them will be to improve it. And just to be clear, if they can, I’ll vote for it.