Glasgow City Council’s budget for 2025/26 will be set this week and it will be done amid the ruins of the budget for 2024/25. The council has already overspent by £38m which the City Treasurer, Ricky Bell of the SNP, said was the only option in the face of all the pressures the council faces. There was, he said, “no other way”, which sounds a lot like a slogan from the old days. Careful Ricky, sounding a bit like Maggie there.

The main factors which the council is blaming for the overspend are higher energy bills, agency staff costs, an increase in the number of kids enrolling for school, and increased rents, rates and repairs in council properties. Mr Bell said a lot of the factors were outwith their control and that the overspend would be covered by the council’s “Budget Support Fund”, a reserve created in 2022. The only alternative, he said, would be “very, very large” increases in council tax.

I have some sympathy with what Mr Bell says. Not only was the council for a long time a victim of the SNP’s ridiculous, regressive council tax freeze, the Government cut council budgets and ring-fenced a lot of the money for its own priorities, such as free school meals. Higher energy bills have also been unavoidable, and staff costs are on the up (we still don’t know yet how councils are going to pay for the increased employers’ national insurance contributions introduced by the UK Government).

So yes, some of the factors which have led to the £38m overspend were outwith the council’s control, but some of it less so. The issue with agency staff, for example, goes all the way back to 2018 when the number of cleansing staff started to fall in Glasgow. The council tried to plug the gaps with agency workers and seven years on they’re still doing it, which not only costs more, it postpones fixing the city’s number one problem: the litter, the mess, the mankiness.........

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