There’s a document sitting on desks across Scottish local government right now that deserves far more attention than it’s getting. COSLA’s whitepaper on Local Government’s Role in Economic Development is, on the surface, a policy paper. But read between the lines and it’s something else entirely. It’s an honest account of what happens when you ask public servants to deliver the future with the funding allocations of the past.
I’ve spent years working alongside councils across Ireland, Scotland, and the wider UK, and I’ll tell you plainly: the people running economic development in our local authorities are among the most capable, committed professionals in the public sector. They are not failing. They are being failed.
The Ambition Is Real. So Is the Constraint.
The COSLA paper sets out an ambitious, coherent vision a wellbeing economy built from the ground up, place-based interventions that tackle child poverty and economic inactivity, a just transition to net zero that doesn’t leave communities behind, and a digital transformation agenda that reaches islands and rural areas as readily as city centres.
It is, frankly, an impressive body of work. Across all 32 council areas, local authorities are delivering employability support, running Business Gateway, convening regional growth partnerships, and trying to align local ambition with both the Scottish Government’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation and the UK Government’s Modern Industrial Strategy simultaneously.
That’s not a simple brief. That’s a genuinely complex, multi-layered mandate.
And they’re doing it while core funding has increased by just 0.2% since 2013/14.
The people running economic development in our local authorities are among the most capable, committed professionals in the public sector. They are not failing. They are being failed.
Shane Collins, CRO at Submit.com
The Numbers Tell a Story That Polite Policy Language Rarely Does
Let me be specific, because the detail matters.
Business Gateway Scotland’s national business support service, which has helped create over 36,000 new start-up businesses and 50,000 jobs in the past five years alone has received no funding increase since 2008. None. If that budget had simply tracked inflation, it would stand at around £28.3 million today. It stands at £16.3 million.
Economic development funding across the sector has fallen from £171 million in 2021/22 to £117 million in 2023/24. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a structural withdrawal.
The UK Government’s Local Growth Fund allocations for Scotland have fallen by 57.4% in 2026/27. The Pride in Place Programme gives Scotland a per capita allocation of £13.52, compared to £66.37 for Wales.
And the Scottish Government recently withheld the final payment of Place Based Investment Programme funding for 2025/26, leaving councils mid-project, mid-commitment, and mid-community promise.
These aren’t abstract figures. They represent redundancy notices served on UKSPF-funded staff. They represent programmes paused or cancelled. They represent the slow, grinding erosion of the very capacity that local government needs to deliver what’s being asked of it.
| Funding metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Economic development funding 2021/22 | £171 million |
| Economic development funding 2023/24 | £117 million |
| Business Gateway budget (actual) | £16.3 million |
| Business Gateway budget (inflation-tracked) | £28.3 million |
| Local Growth Fund reduction for Scotland 2026/27 | −57.4% |
| Pride in Place Scotland per capita | £13.52 |
| Pride in Place Wales per capita | £66.37 |
What I Recognise in This, From the Outside Looking In
At Submit.com, we work with local authorities every day. We build the digital infrastructure that helps councils interact with citizens, manage services, and reduce administrative friction. That puts us in a particular position we see the operational reality behind the policy aspirations.
What strikes me most about the COSLA paper isn’t the ambition, impressive as it is. It’s the honesty about the bind councils are in.
The funding is ring-fenced and time-limited, which means councils can’t plan proactively. They can’t hire with confidence, can’t design services with longevity, can’t do the anticipatory work that prevents crises like the industrial transitions at Grangemouth and Mossmorran from becoming shocks that overwhelm reactive capacity.
I’ve watched capable teams spend enormous energy chasing annual funding cycles instead of delivering strategy. I’ve seen digital transformation initiatives stall not because of a lack of ambition or skill, but because the 18-month funding window doesn’t survive long enough to embed change. I’ve seen the people who do this work who genuinely believe in it leave the public sector because they cannot plan their own futures any more than they can plan their councils’.
This is not a technology problem. But technology is part of how councils can do more with what they actually have.
The Case for Smarter Digital Infrastructure Right Now
COSLA identifies digital transformation as a cost-cutting priority. They’re right. And here is what that means in practice for councils operating under these constraints.
When budgets are squeezed, every administrative hour costs more than it should. Forms that are filled in on paper, manually processed, and re-keyed into systems represent a tax on capacity that councils simply cannot afford to keep paying. Citizen-facing services that are hard to access drive people to phone lines and in-person visits that require staff time. Reporting processes that are fragmented across spreadsheets make it impossible to demonstrate impact to funders at precisely the moment when demonstrating impact is what keeps the funding.
The councils navigating this environment most effectively share one characteristic: they’ve stopped treating digital as a project and started treating it as infrastructure.
That shift doesn’t require enormous capital investment. It requires the right tools, the right approach, and critically a supplier relationship where someone actually understands the context you’re operating in.
Why “We Understand Your Challenges” Has to Mean Something
There’s a particular kind of frustration in local government when a technology vendor walks in and says they “understand the public sector” and then spends the next hour explaining their product features without once acknowledging the funding reality, the political constraints, or the fact that the team across the table is already doing the work of three teams.
I want to be direct about what we believe at Submit.com.
We don’t think councils need to be sold at. We think they need a partner who’s done the homework. Who’s read the COSLA whitepaper. Who knows that “digital transformation” in a council context means something very different from a commercial context it means delivering more for citizens with less, building on legacy systems that weren’t designed for modern service delivery, and justifying every penny of investment in procurement processes that are rightly rigorous.
We have been working with local authorities across Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales long enough to know that what differentiates a good outcome from a poor one isn’t the technology. It’s whether the people implementing it genuinely understand the organisation they’re working with.
What Good Looks Like From Here
The COSLA paper calls for three things from government: certainty, clarity, and flexibility. It wants stable, long-term funding. It wants an end to siloed, centrally designed programmes. It wants devolved power to match local priorities with local solutions.
Those are asks directed at government. But the principle of certainty, clarity, flexibility is one that technology partners should also be held to.
- Councils shouldn’t have to fight their software to get a grant application form published in a week.
- They shouldn’t need a development team to update a service pathway when a funding scheme changes.
- They shouldn’t be locked into contracts that don’t flex with their circumstances.
Scotland’s local authorities are trying to build a wellbeing economy from the ground up, deliver a just transition that doesn’t leave communities behind, and grow the next generation of businesses through Business Gateway all while managing a financial constraint that would ground any comparable private sector organisation.
The least we can do, as a partner to that work, is make sure the digital tools they rely on don’t add to the burden.
Scotland’s councils deserve better than they’re getting from central funding. That’s the honest read of this whitepaper, and it’s one I’d put my name to.
But in the meantime, while that argument is being made and it must be made, loudly and consistently there is still work to do. Services to deliver. Citizens to serve. Businesses to support.
We’re here for that work. And we understand what it actually costs.
Submit.com works with local authorities across Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales to deliver citizen-facing digital services, grant management, and public sector forms infrastructure. If you’d like to talk about what’s possible within your current constraints, we’d be glad to listen first.
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