Council to freeze tax but 75 workers face the axe

Published on Tuesday 3 February 2009 00:51

A SCOTS council has announced it intends to freeze council tax for the second year in a row, while at the same time slashing 75 jobs.

Scottish Borders Council's 265 million budget plans for 2009-10 include 6.4 million of "efficiency savings" as it tries to balance the books.

The full council – controlled by a Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Independent coalition – will meet to ratify the plans on 12 February.

Most of the staff are being made redundant in education, technical services, corporate resources and planning with 27 jobs being lost across other departments.

David Parker, the council leader, said: "We will work to ensure that as many as possible of these redundancies are voluntary and will exhaust all opportunities to redeploy staff."

Neil Calvert, the finance convener, said: "This does not mean that services will be adversely affected. Instead, they will be run in a more effective and efficient way."