MORE cash is needed from the Scottish Government or the care of children and the elderly will suffer, the leader of Fife Council has stated.

David Ross was speaking after it was revealed they need to plug a £10million hole in the social work budget due to rising demand.

He pledged to work with NHS Fife to find the best way forward and will write to Scottish health minister Alex Neil but said, “Without a significant injection of additional funding on a long-term basis, health and social care services in Fife and across Scotland will seriously struggle to meet the needs of our communities.” Fife Council still has to make £77m of further savings over the next three years and one suggestion, the “wholesale privatisation of council services”, has been rejected. Councillor Ross added, “In the longer term, we still face a huge financial challenge and unless something happens at central government level it is inevitable that the savings we are being forced to make will have a real damaging impact on services and staff.” He said the problem was made worse by the council tax freeze which left them “without any means of raising additional funds”.

However, Fife Council’s SNP group leader, Peter Grant, labelled the administration “incompetent” and said, “We have council services being managed by highly dedicated and professional officers but they can’t work miracles.

“They rely on having an effective political administration running the council and under Labour that’s not happening.” The rising demand for social care and children’s services was the main talking point from the mid-year financial report presented to the executive committee on Tuesday. The projected budget position for 2014-15 is a deficit of £3.325m by year end out of a total budget of nearly £800m.

The “significant increases in demand for purchased places for children being taken into care and care packages for adult and older people” has led to a £10m hike in costs but this was “offset by savings made as a result of continuing low interest rates and unused contingency funds”.

Cllr Ross said, “The most important thing arising from this report is that we have received assurances from officers that we will continue to meet our responsibilities to provide social care and to care for vulnerable children, despite the sharp rise in demand for these services we have seen this year.” He said the council had always budgeted for rising demand in those services, with extra investment of £12m, but the increase in demand was “significantly more than previously estimated” and he added, “This on its own accounts for the extra costs of £10m we need to find to the end of this financial year.” Cllr Ross said the previous administration had “budgeted for a significant level of savings that were simply not achievable”.

He explained, “We have already identified alternative means of meeting these unrealistic savings in social care and children’s services but this week we have also set aside the outstanding burden of savings on community learning and halls and centres by using reserves.

“This will give these services the breathing space to remodel themselves on a sustainable basis without having to worry about finding these historic unachievable savings on top.

“Finally, it is evident that health and social care services across Scotland have been badly under-funded by the Scottish Government.

“This isn’t about blame, it’s simply recognising the realities of the situation. Officers are quite clearly telling us that the position is the same across most of Scotland. NHS boards and council social care services are struggling to meet increases in demand for care with inadequate budgets.” Cllr Grant said “unforeseen underspends” had masked the real financial problem and stated, “The underlying position is that the council has an overspend on service provision of nearly £20m.

“If the administration don’t start to show proper political leadership, the £20m overspend won’t just go away, in fact it’s likely to get worse next year.” He added that “Labour and their allies seem to be in complete denial about the scale of the problem” and that they were “queuing up to blame the Scottish Government, blame the previous SNP-led administration in Fife, blame anyone else they could think of”.

“After a debate lasting the best part of an hour we didn’t get a single constructive suggestion as to what action they were going to take,” Cllr Grant finished.