Highland councillors encouraged to cut back

COUNCILLORS in the Highlands are being encouraged to get on their bikes to save money for the cash-strapped authority.

In future, they will be asked to car share, use public transport or cycle to meetings and make better use of video conferencing and web-casting to cut back on travel.

Highland Council, which has to make 60 million of savings over the next three years, is also to save 20 per cent per head, or 9,000 a year, on the cost of councillors' lunches at its Inverness headquarters and will stop providing tea and coffee at meetings that last less than two hours.

Other cost-cutting measures approved by the council include replacing colour print cartridges with black ink only in members' computers and removing photographs of councillors from newspaper adverts promoting their surgeries, reducing the cost of advertising by 14 per cent.

At a meeting yesterday, the council agreed that 50,000 would be removed from the members' budget in 2011-12. This is in addition to a previous 105,000 removed from this year's budget and 78,000 for 2010-2011.

At present, the cost of a cooked lunch on main committee days is 8.20 per head and 5.20 for a light lunch. Under a nationally agreed allowance scheme, members are entitled to claim a maximum of 12 in expenses for lunch if a meal is not provided by the council.

Councillor Carolyn Wilson, chairman of the authority's resources committee, said: "The council has got to make 60 million savings over the next three years and members are aware of the part that they have to play in achieving efficiencies.

"I look forward to future proposals coming to the council on how we can make more significant savings on travel."

Last week the council set its budget for 2010-2011 at 607.2 million and found savings of 12.1 million for this year. It also identified further savings of 11 million in 2011-12 and 2012-13 and estimates that further cuts of 36 million still require to be found in 2011-12 and 2012-13.