– in the Scottish Parliament at on 3 September 2020.
Gail Ross
Scottish National Party
1. To ask the Scottish Government what support it is providing to local authorities in their response to Covid-19. (S5O-04533)
Aileen Campbell
Scottish National Party
To date, the Scottish Government has committed £330 million of additional support for local authorities. Discussions with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities on further financial support and flexibility are on-going. To help with local authorities’ cash-flow difficulties, we agreed with COSLA to front load our weekly grant payments by £455 million during May, June and July.
We have also replaced £972 million of non-domestic rates income—the cost of Covid-19 rates reliefs—with an additional general revenue grant of the same amount, which effectively protects local government funding from the potential loss of non-domestic rates income.
Alongside those measures, the Scottish Government will provide an additional £35 million over the next two years on top of the £100 million funding that it previously announced to help support the return to school, and a total of up to £100 million to support the challenges in the social care sector, which will be provided through integration authorities.
Gail Ross
Scottish National Party
That extra support is welcome. However, Highland Council currently owes the Public Works Loan Board nearly £715 million. Does the Cabinet secretary agree that the United Kingdom Treasury needs to seriously consider writing off local authority debt, or at least consider a payment break, given the significant pressures under which local authorities find themselves at the moment?
Aileen Campbell
Scottish National Party
I agree that it would be of enormous benefit in the current circumstances if local authority debt could be written off without that having an impact on the Scottish budget. However, any approach to HM Treasury to write off local authority debt in Scotland is likely to be met with the requirement that the Scottish Government provides an offsetting reduction to its budget. From that perspective, that is simply not affordable. I recognise that it would be enormously beneficial if HM Treasury was agreeable to something being done.
The cabinet is the group of twenty or so (and no more than 22) senior government ministers who are responsible for running the departments of state and deciding government policy.
It is chaired by the prime minister.
The cabinet is bound by collective responsibility, which means that all its members must abide by and defend the decisions it takes, despite any private doubts that they might have.
Cabinet ministers are appointed by the prime minister and chosen from MPs or peers of the governing party.
However, during periods of national emergency, or when no single party gains a large enough majority to govern alone, coalition governments have been formed with cabinets containing members from more than one political party.
War cabinets have sometimes been formed with a much smaller membership than the full cabinet.
From time to time the prime minister will reorganise the cabinet in order to bring in new members, or to move existing members around. This reorganisation is known as a cabinet re-shuffle.
The cabinet normally meets once a week in the cabinet room at Downing Street.
