On your behalf I chair the Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) providing health and social care services across West Dunbartonshire.

There are many challenges around improving health and wellbeing and the partnership is striving to address them by providing effective services and support focussing on the needs of the community.

The partnership has a budget of more than £150 million and, like all public sector organisations, there have been difficult financial challenges to address.

I want to ensure every single penny is spent on what matters most and that we get value for money while providing services that are effective.

Our employees make a massive contribution and while setting the budget I guaranteed that there would be no compulsory redundancies although the financial pressures meant savings would need to be made to balance the budget.

We were able to achieve that and will also meet the commitment to pay all our adult social care workers the Scottish Living Wage. This will be extended out to sleepover hours and by the end of this financial year we will have invested more than £4m to achieve this. This was denied to these workers by Labour for many years and they should hang their heads in shame at how they treated them.

Unfortunately Labour’s approach to this budget knows no shame. Their failure to achieve savings targets when in power meant a big part of the changes we had to make was tidying up the mess they left. Their proposed council budget would also have needed the same amount of savings for the partnership but they tried to wriggle out of this at the HSCP meeting. Their proposal that we don’t balance the budget was widely ridiculed and got no support from anyone at the meeting.

Now all we get from Labour’s Martin Rooney and Jackie Baillie are crocodile tears and nasty attacks on our services.

When Labour were in power in parliament and the council they did nothing but bring cut after cut. Ms Baillie did not stop colleagues cutting millions from the budget for vulnerable people and presided over dreadful council budget settlements.

I know you won’t be fooled by crocodile tears. We offer a planned approach, guaranteeing no compulsory redundancies and developing services across the area.