IT seems like hardly a day goes by without one of Scotland’s 32 councils announcing plans for huge savings and job losses – such is the scale of the funding challenges facing local government.

Our capital city of Edinburgh, currently run by a Labour-SNP coalition, is seeking to save £126m over the next four years. This would involve the loss of 2,000 jobs by June 2016 with further jobs to go in future years. The council is currently assuming it will increase the council tax by three per cent for three years from 2017. If they are not allowed to do this by the Scottish Government the number of job losses is likely to increase.

SNP-run Dundee City Council is looking to make £28m of savings over the next two years to maintain the council tax freeze. No figures have been put on job losses but they are likely to be considerable.

Our neighbouring council Argyll and Bute, which is run by a coalition led by an independent councillor, has identified a savings target of £26m over the next four years with the potential loss of 450 full-time equivalent posts.

One of Scotland’s largest councils, Labour- run North Lanarkshire, faces making savings of the order of £68m in the next two financial years, with its 12,000 workforce reducing by around 1,100 full-time posts.

The scale of these potential job losses in local government put the recently announced jobs losses in the steel industry – around 270 in Scotland – into some perspective. Of course, it would be criminal for any major industrial nation to be left without a steelmaking capacity so the UK and Scottish governments must do everything in their power to ensure this doesn’t happen.

Jobs losses in local government are nothing new. Unison Scotland has estimated that over 60,000 jobs have been lost from the Scottish public sector since 2009 with 40,000 of these from local government alone. This supports the unions’ claim that local government has borne a disproportionate share of Scottish Government funding cuts.

We in Inverclyde have not been immune from these job losses. Between 2009 and 2015 our workforce reduced from 4,775 to 4,262, a reduction of 513, or 450 if measured in full-time equivalents.

As you will be aware from my previous columns, the council is currently developing our own budget proposals to go out for consultation next month. This work is being overseen by a cross-party members’ working group with support from a joint management and trade union group.

Next week, I will be meeting with council trade union representatives to hear at first-hand their concerns over job losses.

One of the objectives of the Labour administration when setting the budget for the next two financial years will be to keep any further reduction in posts to a minimum.

We have made good progress towards this objective over the last few months but squaring the budget is still likely to involve some very difficult decisions.

I will return to this issue in a future column.