'Hello…I'm on the gravy train' - Scottish councils spend £14m in 3 years on staff mobile phones

SCOTLAND'S councils have spent in excess of £14 million in the past three years on mobile phones for more than 56,000 staff members and elected councillors, new figures have revealed.

Council workers are being handed taxpayer-funded mobile phones at a cost of more than 5m a year to the public purse, with some authorities giving more than a third of their employees handsets.

The figures revealed in freedom of information documents showed that almost one in every five of Scotland's 295,000 council workers has a handset paid for by their employers.

Councils across Scotland give phones to staff across all departments - from social workers to housing staff to bin lorry drivers, with the costs including the bill and handset.

East Lothian Council had the highest percentage of employees with publicly funded mobile phones, with a figure of 38 per cent or 1,192 out of 4,700 costing more than 400,000.

Edinburgh City Council - one of Scotland's largest local authorities - said 6,079 of its staff had been supplied with mobile phones paid for by the council at a cost of nearly 1.3m between 2008 and 2010.

Glasgow City Council provided 2,615 mobile phones to its 22,100 employees - a total of 22 per cent.

A council spokesman said: "Glasgow provides mobile phones to staff wherever appropriate. Doing so helps to save money by increasing efficiency, reducing costs such as travel expenses, generating improvements in service delivery and allowing flexible working."

But the authority said it could not provide a specific figure for the bills, as it was covered by a 265m ten-year contract for all their computer and technology systems. Cash-strapped Aberdeenshire Council's bill for staff mobile phones has almost trebled since 2008. In 2007-08 it spent more than 150,000 - but in 2009/10 that figure had jumped to about 420,000. Orkney Islands council saw a similar jump as it spent more than 37,0000 in 2007-08 - but the bill rose to 118,823.41 last year.

The council paid for phones for 242 out of 2,400 employees - approximately 10 per cent.

Meanwhile, North Lanarkshire Council's bills for its 5,377 phones have soared by about 40 per cent - from more than 290,000 to nearly 414,00 over the three-year period.

The council spent more than 1m over the three years on the phones for 5,377 out of its 16,700 employees. A spokesman for North Lanarkshire Council said: "Mobile phones are not a perk and employees are charged for personal use. Use is monitored closely, with a monthly limit on individual users."

Meanwhile, the total annual bill across Scotland rose by about 12 per cent over the last three years .

John Wilson the SNP candidate for the Holyrood seat of Coatbridge and Chryston called on councils to look for a "better deal for taxpayers".