PUBLIC services and the council tax freeze is shaping up to be a key election issue.

Year after year, thousands of jobs have been lost in councils and the public sector.

Glasgow has shed an army of workers as with every budget it has to find tens of millions of pounds of cuts.

It is no longer ‘trimming fat’ or eliminating inefficiencies, it is reducing the number of workers available to deliver essential services to the required standard.

In Glasgow there have been several cases where home care services have been under the spotlight.

Missed home visits, tasks not completed and vulnerable people left without food or medication are the consequences of budget decisions.

Anyone who thinks that poor service is unrelated to savage budget cuts should book the first flight back to reality.

Council staff, just like in police, fire, health and other publicly funded services we depend on are not miracle workers.

They are, in the main, doing their best trying to provide the best service possible but with every wave of cuts that is made increasingly difficult.

With a growing elderly population demand for these services will increase.

Councils don’t know whether they are coming or going. On the one hand we have City Deals and talk of empowering local decision making but on the other we have budgets controlled by Holyrood with local authorities unable to exercise their power to raise additional cash through the council tax.

Admittedly the increases were getting out of hand but the pendulum has swung even further in the other direction.

Services have to be paid for and so do government priorities and popular polices like free prescriptions, concessionary travel, free school meals and free tuition.

Universality of certain services has benefitted many but the drug companies, bus companies and universities still have to be paid and the cash taken from somewhere.

It has been argued that the poorest already got free prescriptions, and free school meals so the financial benefit of those policies is felt by people further up the income scale.

It can be argued also that cuts to council services hits poorer people harder as they are more likely to need them.

And free university tuition is hardly a universal benefit when it is not possible for every school leaver to go to university.

Every cut in council education budget will make it more difficult for the attainment gap between rich and poor to be closed reducing further the chances of children in the most deprived areas getting anywhere near free university education.

A serious responsible debate about funding public services is one we cannot ignore.