Secrecy involved in council funding helps no one - Iain Whyte

Britain's Simon Yates holds the trophy after winning the Giro d'Italia cycling race, in Rome, Sunday, June 1, 2025. (Gian Mattia D'Alberto/LaPresse via AP)

I have seen le Tour in person before as the peloton flashed past a packed roadside crowd in Nantes, but le Tour in Edinburgh in 2027 is a whole new level of excitement. It should be a cause for celebration with a chance to glimpse road legends like Pogaĉar and Vingegaard or British favourites like the Yates brothers and all the razzamatazz of the event launch. Yet somehow the council has managed to make this controversial.

The issue is that it takes money to host an event of this size and council officers seem to have wanted to keep that quiet. Hidden away in a report on the council’s accounts was a proposal to put £1.7m aside to support hosting the event. This didn’t appear clearly in the recommendations as a funding ask of councillors as is normal.

The plan seems to be to claw the money back from Tourist Tax gained while the event is here, but that only raises further questions. How can we suggest this when these funds are subject to consultation with a group representing business and the community set up under the Tourist Tax legislation?

There are also huge demands on the proceeds of the tax with suggestions from councillors already spending the proceeds many times over. And that’s before cultural, campaigning and business organisations have their say.

To assuage any fears, councillors were issued with a last-minute briefing to explain the situation. Political group leaders had been consulted and had “agreed” that we should push ahead with hosting the event.

Having been part of that meeting, and my recollection may be poor, it was a general discussion of the benefits rather than scrutiny of costs or sources of funding. But that doesn’t matter because the meeting was informal with no decision-making powers.

I support the plan to host the Grand Départ. We can show off our city and the beauty of the surrounding countryside to a worldwide TV audience. This will give a huge boost to our local economy, especially for hard pressed hospitality businesses, and could have further benefits for years to come. All this while the bulk of the funding will come from another taxpayer pocket through the Scottish Government.

But just like the gathering row over the Christmas Market funding I wrote about last week, the secrecy involved helps no one. It’s time the council came clean and followed proper and open governance procedures when funding events.