Council pay falling behind inflation

A typical council worker would be £3,500 better off had their wages risen with inflation, new figures have suggested.

Analysis by the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICE), which has been highlighted by Labour shows the average council employee would have earned £31,978 a year in April 2017 had wages risen with inflation.

Instead, the average coun- cil employee earned £28,533 a year in April 2017.

Scottish Labour’s communities spokesperson Monica Lennon MSP said the difference was a “scandal”.

She said: “Almost 30,000 council jobs have been axed as a result of SNP budget cuts, heaping more work on remaining staff, so it’s a scandal that a typical council worker is now nearly £3,500 worse off. The SNP has squeezed local councils with no extra funding to lift workers’ pay.”

Finance secretary Derek Mackay’s spokesman said: “It was the Scottish Government that led the way in scrapping the 1 per cent pay cap for public sector workers – and since we took office we have taken a number of steps to protect incomes such as abolishing tuition fees, abolishing prescription charges and mitigating the ‘bedroom tax’.

“Despite years of austerity imposed on Scotland by successive Labour and Tory governments at Westminster, we have treated local government very fairly.”