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As part of the 2024-25 Scottish Budget, Scottish Government made available £144 million to councils who chose to maintain Council Tax liabilities at 2023-24 levels. This funding, equivalent to a 5 per cent increase nationally, ensured that councils agreeing to maintain rates were fully funded for that decision thereby protecting both local government budgets and household incomes.

Throughout engagement with COSLA, Councils and opposition parties ahead of the 2025-26 Scottish Budget, there was a clear consensus that Councils should have full flexibility for decisions on council tax rates. The Scottish Budget delivered that ask in full as part of a record Local Government Settlement worth over £15 billion including real terms protection of General Revenue Grant, another key ask of COSLA and opposition parties.

Decisions on Council Tax are therefore a matter for Local Authorities to take in consultation with local communities.

As councils apply that discretion and the impact on low and middle-income households becomes clearer, the most financially vulnerable will continue to be protected through the Council Tax Reduction (CTR) Scheme. The CTR scheme exists to ensure that nobody in Scotland should have to meet a council tax liability they cannot be expected to afford, and reduces a household’s liability based on an assessment of their income, capital, and other circumstances. Over 460,000 households receive some level of CTR, and on average recipients save over £850 a year.

Whilst the vast majority of funding distributed to councils through the Local Government Settlement is distributed using a needs-based formula, including factors such as population, rurality, road length and deprivation, there are a number of discrete funding lines to respond to specific local needs both within and out with the Local Government Settlement.

These include, but are not restricted to, specific funding for inter-island connectivity is currently only available to councils with island communities and specific grants are provided for Vacant and Derelict Land and Regional Transport Partnerships in specific local authorities. Such funding streams are included in the Local government finance circulars - gov.scot which will be published once the Local Government Finance (Scotland) Order is agreed by the Scottish Parliament.

The information requested is not currently held centrally and could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

The 2025-26 Scottish Budget will deliver record funding of over £15 billion for Local Authorities, a 4.7 per cent real terms increase, along with full discretion over Council Tax.

More frequent and meaningful budget engagement with COSLA and Councils was fundamental to informing the record funding settlement made available to Local Government in the Scottish Budget 2025-26.

Ultimately it is the responsibility of individual local authorities to manage their own budgets and to allocate the total financial resources available to them, on the basis of local needs and priorities but Scottish Ministers remain committed to ongoing meaningful engagement to ensure the sustainability of local services.

The average length of the local authority funding settlement since 2014-15 has been one year.

The opportunities of introducing three-year settlements are well understood but there are significant financial risks of doing so without the equivalent clarity from the UK Government given prominence of the adjusted block grant in the Scottish Government’s funding position. It is hoped that the conclusion of the UK Government’s Spending review later this year will create the foundations to allow the Scottish Government to adopt a multi-year approach to funding public services in Scotland. This will be taken forward through the next Scottish Spending Review.

While ring-fenced funding is provided to support increased investment in services such as our schools, inter-island connectivity and criminal justice social work, this represents only 2.7% or £0.4 billion of the overall Local Government Settlement in 2025-26.

Comparisons prior to the historic Concordat agreement in November 2007 do not represent a like for like comparison as Local Government funding changed significantly in 2008-09 when the majority of the former ring-fenced grants provided in the previous year were baselined into to the settlement.

Whilst not directly comparable, the best available data, as published in the Local Government Finance Circular 19/1998 indicates that specific grants worth £543 million were allocated to councils in 1999-00. This was equivalent to 8.29% of ‘Total Aggregate External Finance’.

The Plan for Steel hasn’t been published yet so the Scottish Government has not made an assessment of reported plans for the UK Government to support Scotland’s steel sector. An assessment of confirmed UK Government plans and support will be made following the publication of The Plan for Steel. The Scottish Government will be contributing to the steel strategy consultation; and we will continue to represent the sector, including via my membership on the UK Steel Council.

In addition to the Scottish Government’s previously announced Grangemouth Just Transition Fund, which will support the transition of the industrial cluster in its entirety to help secure a long-term and sustainable future, the Scottish Government has announced £25 million targeted investment for the vitally important Scottish industrial site.

As set out in answer S6W-29116 on 6 September 2024, the cost incurred to date in relation to the planned National Treatment Centre in NHS Ayrshire and Arran, NHS Grampian, NHS Lanarkshire, NHS Lothian and NHS Tayside is as follows.

The national action plan on relationships and behaviour published in August 2024. The first published progress report will publish in the coming weeks.

More frequent and meaningful budget engagement with COSLA and Councils was fundamental to informing the record funding settlement made available to Local Government in the Scottish Budget 2025-26. Scottish Ministers remain committed to deepening and broadening that partnership to ensure the sustainability of local services.

The needs-based formula used to distribute the funding available for local government is agreed with COSLA on behalf of all 32 local authorities each year. Scottish Ministers are open to exploring the funding formula through that meaningful engagement but any proposals for a formal review should properly come through COSLA in the first instance.