Glasgow City Council to axe 1,500 jobs in Â£130m cuts drive

City Council leader Frank McAveety. Picture: John Devlin

Glasgow City Council said the reduction in posts will help it achieve savings of £130 million over the next two years. It stressed there would be no compulsory redundancies.

Frank McAveety, the council’s leader, said it was faced with a “double whammy” of cuts imposed by Holyrood and Westminster.

The council has said the job cuts will be achieved through “natural wastage” as well as the redeployment of staff.

However, the unprecedented scale of the savings will have a widespread impact across the city. As part of its revised budget, the Labour-led local authority’s grant towards 1,250 third-sector organisations will be culled by £6.15m in the next financial year, rising to £7.75m by 2018.

Mr McAveety said: “The £130m cuts we face over the next two years are not just cuts from Westminster. Glasgow has had a double whammy of Holyrood cuts piled on top of those from Westminster.

“When I became leader the city faced a cuts bill of £103m. Now it is £130m. Make no mistake this is a direct result of the Scottish Government’s budget cuts.

“While the Scottish Government budget was cut by 1.5 per cent by Westminster here in Glasgow our budget faces a 4.4 per cent cut from Holyrood. The result can be figured in tens of millions.”

Susan Aitken, leader of the council’s SNP group, said: “It has been clear throughout this debate that the administration are more interested in using the budget as an opportunity to attack the SNP and the Scottish Government than to actually unite to protect the people of Glasgow and their services against the real threat, which is the year-by-year reduction to Scotland’s budget and the consequent impact on every single part of our public sector.”