THE SNP government has presided over cuts on a par with the Thatcher era and starved local authorities of funds needed for vital services, according to one of the country’s largest trade unions.
In a move likely to cause discomfort for Nicola Sturgeon on the eve of the party’s spring conference, Unite seized on figures showing the local government head count has fallen by more than 40,000 since the SNP came to power.
It stood at 284,500 in the third quarter of 2007, the year the Nationalists took office, but dropped to 243,700 jobs in the same quarter of 2015.
The union and Labour also highlighted data from the Scottish parliament’s information centre showing a £1.4bn funding drop since the SNP formed a majority government in 2011, which they said had hit schools and local services.
“This is not a ‘minimal impact’, it is an industrial-scale impact similar to the 1980s,” said Unite’s Scottish secretary Pat Rafferty, who also attacked Sturgeon’s council tax reforms announced last week as “botched and ill-conceived”.
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Sturgeon approaches May’s Scottish elections keen to underline her left-wing credentials, announcing last week that she plans to force households in higher council tax bands to pay up to £500 a year more in addition to giving local authorities the power to increase bills by a further 3%.
It follows her administration’s replacement for stamp duty in which it again sought to portray its approach to taxation as progressive, with those in more expensive properties being hit hardest.
But Rafferty criticised her approach, arguing that councils are setting their budgets against a backdrop of thousands of redundancies and warnings from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities that the government’s settlement for the new year could cost a further 15,000 local government jobs.
He said the Scottish government’s attempts to reform local government funding would not address the funding issues facing the provision of local services and their staffing.
Rafferty said: “The Scottish government is starving local authorities of the funds necessary to maintain vital service provision. Workers are being asked to do far more with minimal resources in the context of major demographic challenges, putting an enormous strain on services.
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“The facts are that more than 40,000 jobs have been lost with potentially tens of thousands more to come as allocations to local authorities have been consistently cut in real terms.”
He added: “This is not a ‘minimal impact’, it is an industrial scale impact similar to the 1980s. The Scottish government’s botched and ill-conceived attempts to reform the council tax, rather than replace it with a sustainable, fairer funding model will ultimately backfire.”
Scottish Labour opportunity spokesman Iain Gray said: “These SNP cuts have robbed a generation of young Scots from achieving their potential. We must not allow that to happen again.”
A Scottish government spokeswoman said all 32 local authorities have secured their share of a £10.3bn funding package for the new financial year, adding: “As autonomous bodies, it is for local government to decide on how they use resources and deliver services effectively to ensure taxpayers and their electorates get the best possible value.”