Councils to fight their corners on budget cuts

A CROSS-party group of local authority leaders will meet with the Cabinet next week to demand that their budgets are spared from the worst of the cuts.

At a meeting of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (CoSLA) in Edinburgh yesterday, council leaders recognised that local government budgets are to be squeezed as a result of the economic crisis.

However, they do not want the SNP Government's desire to protect health spending to result in council budgets being hammered. Amid warnings that the SNP's plans to freeze council tax puts 1,500 Scottish teaching jobs at risk, council leaders forged an agreement that will see them present a united front when they meet with Alex Salmond's Cabinet on Tuesday.

The Scotsman understands that CoSLA is prepared to countenance total council budgets falling from around 11.14 billion to 10.7 billion. But council leaders do not want to see councils taking proportionally more of the pain than other parts of the public sector.

Yesterday, Labour local Government spokesman Michael McMahon warned that teaching job losses would "seriously hit the education of Scottish children". A spokesman for Finance Secretary John Swinney disputed that teaching jobs would go.