Scots council capital funding allocated

Funding

The Scottish Government has announced how £15m of additional active travel expenditure will be shared by councils in 2020/21. The increase to the ringfenced capital grant is overshadowed, however, by a sharp fall in capital grant for local authorities overall.

The capital grant for councils  falls from £1.092bn in 2019/20 to £778m in 2020/21. Much of the grant ringfenced for specific purposes. The amount of general capital grant has been cut from £712m to £468m. 

The top five allocations of the general grant are to: 

• Glasgow £50.7m (down from £80.6m in 2019/20)
• Edinburgh £38.1m (down from £59.2m)
• North Ayrshire £27.5m (up from £18.2m)
• Aberdeenshire £26.3m (down from £37.6m)
• Highland £24.9m (down from £37.7m) 

Dundee sees its general capital grant more than halved, from £30.7m in 2019/20 to £14.9m in 2020/21. Aberdeen’s falls from £27.9m to £18.5m. 

Ringfenced capital grants fall from £357m to £295m. Most are not for transport. One that is, the Cycling, Walking and Safer Streets (CWSS) fund, will have a baseline value of £8.9m in 2020/21, the same as in 2019/20. Glasgow is the only authority to receive more than £1m of it (£1.02m). Edinburgh receives £851,000. 

In addition, the Scottish Government has agreed a £15m one-off top-up to CWSS in 2020/21. This is the result of budget negotiations between the SNP administration and the Green Party, whose support the SNP needed to pass the budget in Parliament. 

Three authorities receive more than £1m of the £15m pot: Glasgow (£1.7m), Edinburgh (£1.4m), and Fife (£1.0m). 

Other allocations include £938,000 for North Lanarkshire, £880,000 for South Lanarkshire, £628,000 for Aberdeen, and £410,000 for Dundee.