Council cuts - 'It is vital to insist on value for money'

there will be some relief in homes across the Capital that 76 lollipop men and women are to be spared the axe in the city's spending purge.

Services for children are being made a high priority as the council reviews where to make cuts, with reprieves also being handed to social workers at the Sick Kids hospital, school library services and closure-threatened libraries in recent days.

What we do not yet know is the true cost of protecting these services, which cost 1.9 million a year to run. In order to balance the books, those savings will now have to come from somewhere else as yet unknown.

The other big question as we await tomorrow's crunch budget meeting at the City Chambers is what the impact of 35 million savings will be on the local authority workforce. To put it in some kind of context, 2000 staff were told yesterday they will lose their jobs at Manchester City Council. The impact may not be quite as hard here, but it will be substantial.

And this is just the beginning of the hard choices for the city as further cuts loom next year and decisions are taken on the potential privatisation of a range of services including bin collections, street cleaning and school meals.

What is vital is that our city leaders stand firm in insisting on value for money for every taxpayer's pound.

If the adage that every cloud has a silver lining is true, then today we are seeing things in reverse. This is just the glint of sunshine before it starts to pour.

Knives are out

THE recently-released film Neds is a fascinating but grim reminder of the gang violence that once gripped parts of Scotland.

The influence of such gangs has never entirely gone away, and our report today makes it abundantly clear that it is not just youths in the worst parts of Glasgow that are sucked in.

We reveal that in the last year the number of under-16s being caught in Edinburgh with offensive weapons has more than doubled.

In one incident a nine year old was found armed with a broken snooker cue, while the dozens of others who were caught will be just the tip of the iceberg.

There is a very real danger therefore that many youngsters are still habitually carrying weapons, especially the blades, which are too readily at hand if a fight breaks out and which fill our hospitals and morgues.

We normally defend liberties, but in the case of knives a zero tolerance approach of a total ban, spot checks and tough penalties is the only answer - for the kids' own good.