The City of Edinburgh Council hold their budget meeting tomorrow morning. This will set the spending for the year to come, even though there will be an administration change in early May following the council elections.
In anticipation of the discussions on spending UNISON the union which represents Edinburgh Council staff will send a deputation to the meeting demanding that the council are transparent about ‘the human cost of yet more massive government cuts’.
They will demonstrate outside the City Chambers tomorrow morning to draw attention to the redundancies among council staff, which are the result of the council’s Transformation Programme. This is an ongoing scheme to reorganise the council into a locality model, and it also means that the equivalent of 1500 full time positions will have been lost by May this year.
Tom Connolly, UNISON Edinburgh lead negotiator, said: “Edinburgh Council will have to find another £40 million in cuts on top of huge year on year cuts that have seen 1,400 jobs lost in the last year. That’s 1,400 people who contributed years of valuable service to the people of Edinburgh including the most vulnerable and underprivileged.
“Services are now on a knife edge and workloads in some areas are unsustainable. We will not accept unacceptable workloads or unsafe working practices and will not tolerate any form of bullying and harassment or discrimination.
“We will be urging the council to stand up for local services and expose the human cost of yet more massive Government cuts by publishing an alternative budget to show what services could be like if properly funded.”
John Stevenson, Edinburgh UNISON President added: “We now know that the SNP Government’s own adviser warned that council cuts would hit the poorest hardest and the Council Tax freeze would benefit the better off. Of all the jobs cuts under the control of the Scottish Government, 87% have come in local government.
“It’s time for the Scottish Government to stop fiddling the figures while piling austerity on to local councils and come clean about the cuts and their effects.”
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
