An expert on Scottish local government has suggested setting up a Citizens’ Assembly to thrash out a future for council services against a backdrop of cuts.

Professor Richard Kerley said the forum could discuss what councils should deliver and how such services should be paid for.

It comes just days after the £40 billion Scottish Budget passed its first stage at Holyrood following a deal between the minority SNP administration and the Greens.

The spending plans include £95 million of further funding for local government, with the Government saying this takes its total additional support for councils to £589m.

However, local authorities argue they are struggling after years of cuts and rising demand. They warn many areas are now at “crisis point”.

In an interview to be published in tomorrow’s Herald on Sunday, Mr Kerley said a wide-ranging review could help shape a sustainable future for local government.

He said: “I think it would be helpful to have another review of what we expect local government to do, and how we expect local government to do it.

“What is appropriate to charge for and not charge for? Because that makes a significant  difference in terms of the usage of facilities and services.”

He added: “I don’t think it can be done by just saying, ‘Okay, we’ll increase this tax or that tax, or stop doing that’.”

The academic said the review could examine what services Scots expect councils to deliver, “and how we might raise some of the money to do that, some of which could be raised locally, some of which would be raised through general taxation as it is now”.

He said it could involve representatives from all of Scotland’s councils and the government “and citizens as well”.

Mr Kerley, professor of management at Queen Margaret University, said: “We’ve seen experiments in terms of the Citizens Assembly.

You could incorporate something like that – plus people who have a particular interest.”

He said the current Citizens’ Assembly of Scotland, which brings together more than 100 people randomly recruited from across the country to discuss key issues facing it, has shown such an exercise is “perfectly possible”.

In the years since devolution, there have been a number of reviews set up to consider local taxation.

In 2006, the Local Government Finance Review Committee proposed a “radical alternative” to council tax. It recommended a “new progressive Local Property Tax (LPT) ... based on the capital value of individual properties”.

Around a decade later, the Commission on Local Tax Reform recommended a programme of changes, including multiple forms of tax and a review of central grants.

The Barclay Review into business rates in 2017 also examined the role of local authorities.

Mr Kerley said it is “undisputed the proportion of central government spend that has gone to support local government over the past X years has been decreasing gradually compared to other areas of spend”.

It comes as Scotland’s council leaders yesterday expressed disappointment that the agreed Budget deal only makes good the underfunding of new and existing commitments required by the Scottish Government and does nothing to address inflationary or demand pressures.

It also fails to make any restoration of the significant cuts to Local Government core funding in previous years.

Leaders agreed that, as such, the settlement represents a 2 per cent or £205million cut in real terms in revenue funding for Local Government.

Council Leaders instructed the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities to continue to lobby strongly for the additional 2% funding for inflationary pressures and 3% for restoration of previous funding cuts and for restoration of the £117m cut to the capital allocation.

Mr Kerley said: “There clearly comes a point where councils have to say, as they have been saying for years, some of them, ‘we can’t keep trimming a bit off here and a bit off there, and turning the lights off earlier’ and stuff like that.

“In the longer term, you can’t provide for increased public services without increasing the flow of money into that – whether that’s through taxation or charging, and we’ve generally resisted charging of various kinds, though everywhere you look where councils are enabled to charge they are increasing the charges they are putting on things.

“And they are testing out, with for example musical tuition, whether they can charge for that. I think that’s going to be an interesting test of legal commitment and legal powers and legal authority when it – as I think it will – goes into court in some shape or form.”

Mr Kerley said local authorities charging for services has always been “a bit of a tangle”, adding: “We charge for some things and we don’t charge for others. Some of them are statutorily protected in terms of charging. You can’t charge for lending library books, but you can charge for the late return of library books.

“You charge for theatres, you charge for going into a swimming pool – how much you charge is a matter of what you need to raise and what you think people will pay.”

He said reforming council tax is “one possibility”, but added the “big challenge for any government is the notion that you can, through a local property tax and indeed through income tax, make all of this additional money up through just affecting wealthy people or rich people...[it] just doesn’t hold”.

Councils argue funding provided by the Scottish Government is often ringfenced, funnelling extra cash directly into areas chosen by ministers, such as the expansion of free childcare.

But Mr Kerley said the degree of ring-fencing “is considerably less than it was 10 or 15 years ago”.

He said: “It’s reduced, but it’s now creeping back up again – I think most obviously with nursery education, because the huge commitment to, in a sense double, the amount of nursery education available for three and fouryear-olds meant councils had to create often purpose-built facilities or improve the ones they had, increase staffing and so on. The nature of what councils do has crept up and crept up and crept up over time.”