3,000 council staff face axe as budgets are slashed

Published on Saturday 6 February 2010 19:34

SCOTLAND'S councils are facing a cut of £305 million and the loss of 3,000 jobs over the coming financial year, according to a union survey on the public sector squeeze.

• Dave Prentis: Unison general secretary spoke at Glasgow rally.

Care assistants who treat people in their own home and learning assistants in schools are likely to be the first to lose their jobs as a result of the cutbacks, according to Unison.

The union claims the cuts are far deeper than feared because councils have been hit by a decline in the amount of income they pull in from charges and fees, as a knock-on result of the recession.

In total, the 305 million drop in income is equal to a 3 per cent drop from last year.

While no compulsory job cuts have yet been ordered, many local authorities are expected to call for voluntary redundancies to reduce their salary bill.

The figures were collated by Unison from officials who have been negotiating with councils as they set their budgets for the new financial year, starting in April 2010.

Dave Watson, Unison's Scottish organiser, said: "The big departments will take the brunt, social care and education. That means you will find reduced numbers of classroom assistants. And reduced amount of support available in peoples' own homes."

He added: "The real cut is six times greater than the reduction in the Scottish Government's allocation to councils. The reason for that is many councils don't start from where they were last year. The sums that councils are earning from charges and fees has fallen."

At a rally in Glasgow yesterday, Unison general secretary Dave Prentis launched a campaign against the cutbacks, and accused all political parties of engaging in "macho politics" in their efforts to enforce cutbacks.

"No school cleaner gambled billions on the stock exchange," he said. "None of them created this recession. Why should they be expected to pay for it?"

Prentis said Gordon Brown should follow the example of Barack Obama and impose a pay freeze on bankers.

Senior council officials meanwhile warned that major cuts in council budgets would inevitably lead to reductions in staffing numbers in schools.

John Stodter, general secretary of the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland, said: "If you are going to make big savings you cannot not look at your teaching staffing."

Unison's warning of cuts this year is troubling for parents as it is likely to be only a foretaste of what is to come over the next three to four years, as the UK Government seeks to reign in spending to reduce its huge budget deficit.

The Scottish Government's permanent secretary, Sir John Elvidge, has now publicly warned that the cutbacks could amount to around 20 per cent over the next seven years.

Speaking last week, Elvidge also warned explicitly that the number of public sector posts would inevitably have to fall to compensate.

"I don't think there's any future that we can see within these numbers (the cuts] that doesn't involve fewer jobs in the public sector," he said.

"We know that a very substantial proportion of our public expenditure costs in Scotland goes on the salaries of people. So any prediction about the future that doesn't suggest that workforce numbers will have to move downwards broadly in line with the downward movement in aggregate budgets would have something odd about it."

The Scottish Government last week announced it was to set up an independent review body to study how best to handle the coming cutbacks. The identities of the members of the three-person panel have yet to be announced.