At the moment I won’t be deciding on what cuts are made as my party is not in government – but we will have to be prepared if we are in power again after the Scottish Parliament elections next May. We will need to work out how to do more with less money, how to be more efficient and less bureaucratic, and protect the most important services even if it has to be at the expense of what is less important. It’s going to be very hard.
No decisions have been made yet but every service committee has been informed of their share of the £21m. Many options are being costed and impact assessed at the moment and the next round of committee meetings will prioritise the costed options prior to full Council deciding what cuts to accept and include in next year’s budget. I certainly never thought I would have to face such dreadful decisions and I’m not looking forward to it at all.
We are spending a lot of time looking at what we ought to cut. It’s not easy, but we will try to be as fair as possible by cutting a bit in every council department, so that so everyone takes some cuts, otherwise if some departments took no cuts the others would have to take more. Secondly, we are trying to cut things that won’t affect the public too much. For example, in education promoted teachers will probably lose some of the time they have away from the classroom, but if that means we can avoid losing class teachers that will be a better option.
Elaine Murray answered on 29 Sep 2010:
At the moment I won’t be deciding on what cuts are made as my party is not in government – but we will have to be prepared if we are in power again after the Scottish Parliament elections next May. We will need to work out how to do more with less money, how to be more efficient and less bureaucratic, and protect the most important services even if it has to be at the expense of what is less important. It’s going to be very hard.
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Sandra McDowall answered on 29 Sep 2010:
No decisions have been made yet but every service committee has been informed of their share of the £21m. Many options are being costed and impact assessed at the moment and the next round of committee meetings will prioritise the costed options prior to full Council deciding what cuts to accept and include in next year’s budget. I certainly never thought I would have to face such dreadful decisions and I’m not looking forward to it at all.
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Alastair Witts answered on 29 Sep 2010:
We are spending a lot of time looking at what we ought to cut. It’s not easy, but we will try to be as fair as possible by cutting a bit in every council department, so that so everyone takes some cuts, otherwise if some departments took no cuts the others would have to take more. Secondly, we are trying to cut things that won’t affect the public too much. For example, in education promoted teachers will probably lose some of the time they have away from the classroom, but if that means we can avoid losing class teachers that will be a better option.
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