Of austerity

ANY OTHER

by their employers, such as setting money aside to top up pension pots.

Labour MSP Ken Macintosh, the shadow finance secretary, uncovered the data through scores of Freedom of Information requests.

He said: “We are in the midst of the worst unemployment crisis for a generation and this government has spent more than half a billion pounds not on getting Scots into work, but on pushing them out the door.

“In one year alone, 2010-2011, the Scottish Government spent more than £200m getting rid of 10,000 people.

“What a perverse, misguided and fundamentally incompetent waste of taxpayers’ money.”

He said that while SNP Finance Secretary John Swinney’s refused to find £35m extra funding for colleges in next Wednesday’s final budget vote, the sector was spending £41m laying off staff.

Macintosh said: “John Swinney clearly thinks he can blame everything on the Tories and on Westminster, but this staggering increase in spending has happened under his allegedly ‘prudent’ stewardship.

“For two years running Mr Swinney has talked of a budget for jobs, but instead of spending money on wage subsidy or job creation programmes, he has spent £600m putting more people out of work.”

However, Dave Watson, Scottish organiser of the public- sector union Unison, said the Scottish Government had few choices when the Westminster coalition was cutting budgets for “ideological reasons”, and was actively trying to shrink the state.

He said: “The Scottish Government has a limited ability to take a different direction – the only people who can change the big picture are at the Treasury.”

A spokesman for John Swinney said: “Public-sector employment is falling in Scotland as a result of the cuts in public spending applied by the Tory- led UK Government, who Labour are campaigning with in the anti-independence campaign.

“Despite these Tory cuts, the Scottish Government are committed to no compulsory redundancies as a means of supporting economic recovery and consumer confidence in Scotland.

“While we encourage councils to follow our lead, they are independent bodies, responsible for managing the terms and conditions of employment of local government employees.

“The costs of the Scottish Government voluntary exit scheme will be recouped in three years and will deliver recurring savings of £13m a year, as part of action to significantly cut our central spending. Last year alone we achieved savings of over £64m in our central spend.”