Scottish councils should buy more goods and services from local firms, in order to deliver a £140m annual boost to their economies, according to the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB).
Launching its manifesto for May’s local authority elections, the small business campaign group highlighted that Scottish councils have a combined procurement budget of around £7bn. However, the average Scottish local authority spends less than a third (29.1%) of this with businesses from within its boundaries.
It stated that if all councils gave local firms an additional 2% of their total procurement budgets per year, this would deliver a £140m annual boost to local economies across Scotland.
