Fife Council has spent more on legal, consultancy and other fees to deal with equal pay claims in the last few years than any other local authority in Courier Country, according to statistics obtained by the Scottish Conservatives through freedom of information.
Fife has also settled considerably more claims than its council counterparts in Tayside and has more claims outstanding.
The Conservative-supplied figures show that councils across Scotland still have more than 32,000 outstanding equal pay claims to deal with.
Of these, 2,194 are in Fife, 233 are in Perth and Kinross, 179 are in Dundee and two are in Angus.
The figures also show that Scottish local authorities have already spent more than £4 million fighting various cases, while 3,500 new claims were made in the last 18 months alone.
In Fife, £160,950 has been spent on legal, consultancy and other fees. In Perth and Kinross the figure is £52,700, in Angus it’s £19,559 and in Dundee there has been no money spent.
In Scotland, a total of 26,838 cases have been settled since 2008 with 1,449 in Fife, 170 in Dundee, 10 in Perth and Kinross and nine in Angus.
The Conservatives say the statistics point to the ”sheer scale and cost of the failure to deal with equality claims”.
Scottish Conservative local government spokeswoman Margaret Mitchell MSP said: ”It is quite simply not sustainable that Scotland’s councils are continuing the scandal of spending such enormous sums of money delaying the legitimate settlement of equal pay claims.”