Finance

Jamie McGrigor (Conservative) | Question S3W-40475

To ask the Scottish Executive how much local authority grant support funding has been allocated per capita for (a) Orkney, (b) Shetland and (c) the Western Isles in each year since 1999.

John Swinney (Scottish National Party)

The information requested is contained within the following tables.

The figures in these tables represent total revenue figures for the period 2008-12 and Aggregate External Finance for the period 1999-2008. The local government finance settlements changed from 2008-09 when the vast majority of the former ring-fenced funding streams were rolled-up into the settlement allocations. Allocations to individual local authorities of the former ring-fenced grants paid out under the previous administration are not available for the years up to and including 2006-07. In order to make a comparison between 2007-08 and 2008-09, the 2007-08 figures are presented in table 1 as a constructed baseline (including the ring-fenced funding) and in table 2 as the actual published figures (without the ring-fenced funding). As a result of the addition of the ring-fenced grants from 2007-08 in Table 1, it should be noted that the figures for 2007-12 in table 1 are comparable and those for 1999-2008 in table 2 are comparable. It follows that figures for 2007-12 in table 1 are not comparable with those for 1999-2008 in table 2 since they are constructed on a different basis.

Table 1 Scottish Government Revenue Funding to Local Government 2007-12

Note: *The 2011-12 figures are taken from the Local Government Finance (Scotland) Amendment Order 2011.

Table 2 Scottish Government Revenue Funding to Local Government 1999-2008