Drafting Highland Council’s new budget left its leader “close to tears” because of the severity of service cuts needed to balance the books.
Michael Foxley made the revelation during a debate in Inverness yesterday which rubber-stamped a third successive council tax freeze and ended with a forecast of “much worse to come.”
The Independent/Liberal Democrat/Labour-run authority faced SNP-led votes on 11 separate financial proposals, but comfortably won them all to confirm 70 job cuts – mainly in schools – and other service reductions which opponents warned would hit the region’s most vulnerable people worst.
The spending reduction in the three biggest departments, education, social work and transport, was the final stage of a process to meet a projected £12.1million shortfall in the coming financial year.
The council has identified further savings of £11million in 2011-12 and 2012-13, but estimates £36million more will have to be found from budgets in those two years.
Despite a 2010-11 package of £607.2million – up from £597.7million this year – the council’s Lib Dem budget leader David Alston said inflation and the UK banking crisis had forced the moves.
To applause from many councillors, his party colleague and council leader Dr Foxley said: “This is to sort out the public sector finances because of the money given to the banks. There’s real pain in this. When I saw the list when this initially came out I was close to tears. There’s real pain and there’s much, much worse to come.
“The importance of all this is to make sure that in 2012-13 this council survives, because some councils in Scotland are not going to survive in their current form. ”
He stressed the administration agreed to a 14-month discussion period with voluntary organisations affected by grant cuts to allow time “to manage the process”.
Mr Alston said: “We have made every effort to protect frontline services and the grants we provide to voluntary organisations.”
That was disputed by SNP councillors, who described many cuts as “arbitrary”.
Group leader John Finnie said: “This budget was going to ‘show the way to the future’. Well, the way to the future would seem to be that the first thing you attack is frontline services.”
He and colleagues attempted to overturn cuts in foreign language assistants in schools, grants to voluntary bodies, and challenged a review of daycare services for the elderly and reduction in subsidy to lunch clubs.