I must take issue with Councillor Douglas McAllister’s previous column in the Post.

Most of his column I can dismiss as the next day’s chip paper, but his musings on the demise of Greenlight are dangerous in the deliberately misleading way they are written.

Members of the public have taken his comments regarding Greenlight Environmental Ltd as a suggestion that the council is somehow responsible for this private limited company failing and that the council is somehow duty bound to employ everybody who once worked for them.

These are alternative facts worthy of reality TV president extraordinaire, Donald Trump, not an elected official of West Dunbartonshire Council and certainly not a member of the Law Society of Scotland.

Greenlight was a private limited company run by a board of directors (you can look them up on the Companies House website) that did not pay its bills and has folded, leaving more than 100 people redundant.

The council did not own or run any part of Greenlight; we simply bought a service from them, as we do from other companies like Viking Direct or Microsoft.

What did Labour do for the staff when BHS collapsed, or Woolworths or any number of businesses employing local people? I’ll tell you exactly what they did - exactly what we have been doing from day one, working with administrators to ensure our employability teams have been on hand, in person, to help anyone who wanted assistance to find a new job.

I find the hypocrisy from Labour astounding. They say we must employ all former Greenlight staff at taxpayers’ expense, putting at risk council services and current council employees’ jobs.

I’m delighted that we have been able to employ some of the staff to deliver the services Greenlight Environmental Ltd used to supply to us, but unfortunately we just don’t have work for everyone. We are assisting everyone who wants our help and will continue to do so on an ongoing basis.

None of the frontline staff are responsible for the downfall of Greenlight Environmental Ltd and they deserve to know the full truth of how and why the company failed. I end this column by calling on the directors to explain the circumstances that have led to this failure and loss of jobs.