Councils react to Chancellor's spending cuts
Representatives of Fife, Angus and Dundee City councils gave their reactions to the Chancellor's announcement of spending cuts and how the new fiscal realities will affect the services offered by local authorities.
- By Craig Smith
- Published in the Courier : 21.10.10
- Published online : 21.10.10 @ 06.31am
Fife Council leader Peter Grant yesterday maintained that customers will continue to come first, despite UK public spending facing cuts of around 19% over the next four years.
"Here in Fife we will still be investing more than £800 million in our public services and it's important that we don't lose sight of this," he said.
"The Chancellor's announcement today gives us some understanding however, of how severe the cuts will be UK-wide, although it will still be several weeks before we can gauge the exact impact on Fife.
"Our first priority continues to be the people who need our services the most and our budget decisions will reflect this.
"The challenge ahead is for us to balance the need for around £120 million savings by 2014, growing demand for services, the opportunities for efficiency and improvement and delivering on our priorities.
"Innovation has to be the key to how we move forward as we can't pretend that we can achieve all the savings we need without making some radical changes to how we work and deliver services to Fifers.
"Often by changing the way we deliver a service we can save money while protecting or even improving the benefits to service users. We already have some great examples of employees rising to the challenge, and showing real innovation in the jobs they do."
Mr Grant added there was no doubt some "difficult and unpopular" decisions lie ahead, but the council leader reiterated the importance of speaking to Fifers over the next months as the council moves through the budget process.
He continued, "By making sure there are ongoing conversations with our employees and local people we can look at ways of changing how we deliver services and understand better the impact that these changes may have.
"A new drive from November will help explain how we will take forward a Fife-wide conversation which will help inform our budget strategy and make sure that Fife continues to be a great place to live, work and visit."
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