A meeting of Highland Council’s key resources committee had to be postponed yesterday due to the weather-related outages affecting council offices and councillors’ home offices.
Flooding at a telephone exchange in Edinburgh caused network and internet issues at hundreds of sites across Scotland.
Budget leader Alister Mackinnon chairs the corporate resources committee, and was due to give councillors an update on how the council’s finances are being impacted by Covid-19.
The council’s meetings are currently being held remotely, and yesterday’s problems became clear early on, when few councillors were able to attend the pre-meeting from their home offices.
Mr Mackinnon then travelled in vain from his base in Dingwall to council HQ to see if matters could be rectified.
He said: “I’m sorry we had to cancel the committee meeting.
“The network issues across Scotland, beyond our control, have caused serious network problems for us since last night.
“I have been in touch with committee members and the meeting will be rescheduled at a later date.”
Councillors were due to discuss news that the council’s predicted budget gap this year has gone down again, and now stands at around £28.5m, in a ‘central’ scenario which could go in either direction depending on how the pandemic continues to unfold.
