HEALTH and social care services in Argyll and Bute will be protected as a result of the local authority's spending plans for the next financial year.

Argyll and Bute Council will give an extra £1.5 million a year to the area's health and social care partnership after the area’s 36 local councillors met in Lochgilphead on Thursday to vote on the local authority’s 2018-19 budget.

And despite facing a potential £27 million of service cuts over the next two years, the council leader told the Advertiser that prioritising roads and protecting health and social care was “absolutely the right thing to do”.

Speaking ahead of Thursday's meeting, Councillor Aileen Morton said: “One of the administration priorities agreed by council last September was to support individual and community wellbeing.

“So that’s why we will be looking to allocate some additional funding to this area, as well as rejecting the proposed £725,000 cut to social work services.

“We are agreed as an administration that this is absolutely the right thing to do, despite the lack of longer term budget commitment from the Scottish Government which does mean some risk to the council.

“Supporting health and wellbeing is just part of the administration’s proposals for this year’s budget.”

Councillor Gary Mulvaney, depute leader of the council, whose portfolio includes strategic finance, added: “Like all councils we have to change the way we do things, given the scale of the financial challenges we face.

“I firmly believe that what people want is a financially responsible council taking sensible decisions, while still providing the best possible outcomes for communities with the money we have.

The council’s final financial settlement from the Scottish Government was approved the day before the authority's budget meeting, following the ‘stage 3’ debate and vote in the Holyrood chamber on the SNP minority government’s spending plans.

As previously reported in the Advertiser, a deal struck by the Scottish Greens to support the SNP’s budget proposals at Holyrood led to the provisional allocation of more than £3 million extra to Argyll and Bute.