YOUR report on the impact of budget timetables on Government and councils is perhaps a little over dramatic.

My experience on Fife Council is that budgets are not as rigid as described. I suspect it’s the same elsewhere.

To take one small example, Fife’s Education Service has a centrally held budget to cover longer staff absences, through illness, maternity leave or whatever. This is set each year and almost immediately predicted to be overspent by about £2m.

I’ve pointed this out several times but it isn’t fixed because it doesn’t seem to matter. Money is moved from another underspent budget to sort it out. That’s entirely legitimate because council officers have the authority to shuffle money around, provided they live within their overall totals.

Councils have to set a “budget” by mid-March but what that really means is setting the Council Tax, so the bills can go out.

For a decade, that’s been trivially simple. It goes up by the maximum that the Scottish Government approves of – zero during the freeze and a few percent per year since. It doesn’t require all the expected income to be allocated there and then, since re-allocation happens in year.

What’s far, far more important for councils is their treatment by the Scottish Government which, on any set of figures, has starved them for years. The SG has been promised a £1.2bn uplift from the UK budget in March. A fair allocation of that would largely solve Fife Council’s financial problems in the coming year.

DAVID DEMPSEY,

Leader of the Opposition,

Fife Council.