Shetland Islands Council (SIC) looks set to balance its books and meet its ambitious savings targets at least one year ahead of schedule.
However, this success is not likely to reduce pressure to keep cutting costs, especially in education where the council is now examining why its secondary schools are so much more expensive than on Scotland’s other islands.
This week the council revealed that it had brought down the draw on its oil reserves to its lowest level in more than a decade.
It follows a massive drive to cut spending that has seen the SIC’s workforce shrink by more than 600 people – a cut of 21%.
The council is now drawing £42,000 a day from its oil-funded deposits, down from around £100,000 a day three years ago, but still £16,000 a day more than it can afford.
SIC leader Gary Robinson said that he expects the council to reduce that figure to a sustainable level by the end of the next financial year in March 2016, more than a year before the target date of the council elections in May 2017.
However, community resistance remains strong against a major plank in the council’s savings drive: the closure or reduction in size of rural schools, which would remove £3million from the budget.
Hundreds of people are expected to march through Lerwick on June 7 to protest against the plans to remove S3 and S4 from Shetland’s five junior high schools and to close four rural primaries.
Mr Robinson said the major financial question facing the islands was the huge disparity in the cost of educating secondary school pupils in Shetland compared to the other Scottish islands.
In Shetland, the cost per secondary pupil was almost £14,000 last year, having increased by around £1,000 over the previous three years.
This is over £3,000 more than it costs per pupil in the western isles and Orkney and around double the Scottish average.