Kezia Dugdale homed in on the swingeing cuts facing Perth and Kinross Council to attack the Scottish Government’s slashing of local authority budgets.
The Scottish Labour leader told Holyrood at First Minister’s Questions that the SNP council were looking at laying off teachers and chopping childcare budgets because of a £500 million cut meted out to local authorities by the Government.
Ms Dugdale told Nicola Sturgeon that Perth and Kinross was holding a special budget meeting to “discuss the cuts they are being forced to make because of the choice that this First Minister has made”.
“That’s the SNP controlled council in John Swinney’s backyard,” Ms Dugdale said this afternoon.
“[There are] 186 pages worth of cuts. Cuts to childcare, cuts to help for those with additional support needs, cuts to early years teachers, cuts to maths and English teacher – page after page of SNP cuts that will harm our children’s futures.
“That’s the reality from one of First Minister’s own councils.”
Ms Dugdale called on the First Minister to follow Labour’s lead and add 1p to income tax to protect education spending.
But the First Minister condemned Labour’s “out of touch and callous” plan, which she said will punish those on low incomes.
Ms Sturgeon added the funding package for councils amounted to 2%, which is offset by £250m for health and social integration.
“That settlement, which has now been accepted by all the local authorities in Scotland, enables us to protect households by freezing the council tax, enables us to protect the number of teachers in our schools,” she said.
“It enables us to invest in and expand social care and it enables us from October of this year to ensure that all social care workers are paid the living wage.”
Labour MSP Jenny Marra called on the First Minister to do more to ensure that places like Dundee do not miss out on the opportunities from the £30 billion oil decommissioning industry.
She said Dundee has a river ideally suited for the industry, but was seeing platforms “sailing past” to be dismantled in the north of England.
Ms Sturgeon said work was in place to capitalise on the new industry, but wanted to avoid “premature” decommissioning, adding there are still 22 million barrels of oil and gas to be extracted from the North Sea.
The Scottish Conservatives leader Ruth Davidson attacked the First Minister for presiding over the “complete failure of management” over the handing out of EU subsidy payments to Scots farmers.
She said: “The First Minister has lost the trust of rural Scotland. She is overseeing yet another Government IT fiasco and farmers no longer have confidence in her rural affairs minister.”
Ms Sturgeon said they are “working as hard as they can” to get the Common Agricultural Policy payments to farmers as quickly as possible.
Willie Rennie, the Scottish Liberal Democrats leader, told Ms Sturgeon she should stop the cuts to councils’ education budget by raising income tax, which his party proposed last month.
First Minister’s Questions as it happened: