Leader: Public sector cuts

The pages of the News have been filled to a regrettable degree with details of how public sector bosses plan to deal with the pain caused by the ongoing financial crisis.

The city council has featured prominently, given chief executive Tom Aitchison's announcement that 1,200 job losses may result from a need to cut budgets by 12 per cent.

NHS Lothian, too, is looking to save tens of millions of pounds and expects 2,000 staff posts to disappear as a result.

Every other branch of the public sector is in the same boat, including Lothian's police and fire services, the Scottish Government and the parliament, plus the scores of quangos which have stubbornly resisted successive governments' so-called "bonfires".

There is no doubt that there is a very real need to slim down the public sector, which now employs one in three working Scots. That's unsustainable.

In the long-term, our nation cannot hope to prosper unless economic growth is built solidly on private sector foundations, led by entrepreneurs and tradesmen and women making money by providing services.

In the short-term, the public finances are so bad that civil servants of all kinds now have to experience a degree of pain which the sector has largely been spared in recent years.

But as those in charge draw up their cuts plans they must remember that every red line drawn through a payroll number affects a real person and their family. That's not just good industrial relations, it's the right, human thing to do.

That means consulting staff properly and explaining why hard decisions sometimes have to be made. It also means convincing those who pay for and use public services – and that's all of us – that they are making the right sort of cuts.

The News this week has already taken NHS Lothian to task for insisting no front line staff would be affected by its 2,000 job losses – only for this newspaper to discover that 333 nursing jobs would go.

We accept that managers will look to restructure their services to ensure that the high standards of local health professionals are maintained. But we find it hard to believe that they need to recruit another penpusher on a 100,000 salary to do so.

And we are sure every employee looking ahead to 2,000 job losses will agree.