Leadbitter: 'we will fight to prevent compulsory redundancies'

MORAY is facing the toughest budget for many years, say the council’s leader.

Current projections show the Moray council with a £19 million budget deficit, which needs to be rectified over two years, with £12million required to be found by February.

The SNP, who took over the council administration in June of this year, yesterday set out plans to reduce the council’s annual spend by over £5million

Speaking after the meeting the council leader Graham Leadbitter (Elgin South, SNP) said: "This is, without doubt, the most challenging budget that the council has faced in many, many years.

"When the SNP council group took over the council administration in June after the Conservatives abandoned the previous coalition, we knew exactly what we were taking on, however none of us stood for council expecting an easy ride and will are not shying away from the responsibility that we have to balance the Council’s books.

"In the short-term that has meant some very difficult decisions to produce the interim budget plan that we presented to the Council this week. We know that having to cut this amount from the budget has an impact on jobs and an impact on the services that the people of Moray receive but it would be much worse if we allowed the council’s finances to continue to deteriorate.

"In considering the savings that we have to make we have done it with the aim of protecting preventative spend as far as possible and protecting as many facilities as we could, such as keeping swimming pools and libraries open.

"We know that to close these facilities would mean they would be highly unlikely to re-open and that is a step we are not prepared to take if we can possibly avoid it.

"In our manifesto we committed to protecting education, making reductions in management and having no compulsory redundancies. We remain committed to those aims, despite the fact that other councillors, with the exception of the Labour councillor at the meeting voted in favour of compulsory redundancies.

"We have time to work to prevent compulsory redundancies and we will do all that we can before December.

"We have been in opposition in Moray through 10 years of budgets where successive administrations have been living off council reserves, while the remaining reserves are still under pressure we are determined over the next two years to get the council on an even keel.

"This week is the first step and possibly the toughest and alongside these actions we are working with the council’s management team on a range of transformation projects that will be a much more sustainable approach to the council’s future budget process and which will redesign and re-shape services to reflect the changing demand and increasing population that we have in Moray, which is especially the case with a growing number of service and civilian personnel at Lossiemouth and Kinloss.

"In addition to this work we are also lobbying at national level through COSLA and directly with Scottish government ministers in a bid to improve the financial situation for the council and to help us get through this difficult stage and bring the focus back to the positive contribution to Moray that our council staff, and the services they deliver, have each and every day.

"In spite of the budget pressures that we have, the council invests nearly quarter of a billion pounds every year in public service provision in Moray and we should never lose sight of the difference that those services make to the more than 90k people across the region."