SCOTLAND’S largest council needs to cut 3,000 jobs within three years with savings in excess of £100million in order to “just to keep the lights on."

Warning of a decade of shrinking funds, Glasgow City Council has outlined the need for a long-term reduction in its funding and resources in a new report which exposes the extent of the cash gap it must bridge.

The document, to be discussed before the local authority’s decision-making body next week, calculates that a bare minimum of £103 million, roughly seven percent of its current budget, needs to be found in savings over the next two years.

Glasgow’s leader, councillor Gordon Matheson said: “The pressures that will be coming in the next two years go beyond anything we’ve had to deal with before. This will come from cuts to our grant, along with other unavoidable cost pressures such as wage inflation and the introduction of domestic food waste collection.

“Dealing with this may well involve difficult decisions, but I am not prepared to consider cutting services unless far greater savings are made from operating the organisation more efficiently.”

The total for the cuts and savings planned equates to just under half of the city’s council tax collections in one year. It is equivalent to the loss of 82,000 homes in the Band D bracket for the charge.

The figure is also around £35 million more than the total cost of running Orkney Council for one year.

Glasgow’s figures take no account of capital funding pressures.

It faces reducing its staffing levels to balance the books, with a further 3000 expected to go by 2018.

Sources claim it is too early to say what the impact on services may be but insisted it expected to get the bulk of its savings through changes to how it operates.

It also cited English councils, where the cuts have been much more severe and less than a third of saving have been achieved through scaling cut or axing services.

The details comes as it emerges Scotland’s councils face an impending financial black hole of around £1billion between 2016 and 2019, as the impact of austerity accelerates on public services north of the border.

Although Glasgow has said not has not looked beyond 2018 it is not expecting any let up in the following year, with its cuts averaging £35M-a-year since 2010.

The Herald has relaunched its Reshaping Scotland campaign, calling for prompt solutions to protect services such as education, care and cleansing, as well as jobs, from oncoming cuts.

One senior source at Glasgow said: “We just don’t what the government is going to give us and this all is based on our financial outlook and projections. But you’re looking here at £103m just to keep the lights on. There isn’t any low-lying fruit anymore.”

The city’s report is the first concrete indication of the extent of the cuts local authorities are facing in the years ahead.

The report claims “the council, the services it provides and the community organisations and businesses it supports” will have less resources for the next 10 years, adding: “Looking to the immediate future, the most challenging financial period is between 2016 and 2018.”

Sources also claim there has been no discussions on plans for major outsourcing of services to the private sector, but the report adds: “The economic outlook is not positive and we must plan for the longer term. As a result we need more service reform and to be open to looking further at joint business models, with investors and other providers.

“We need to accelerate and widen our approaches to take account of the significant financial challenge and the current pressures on our services and resources.

“We will plan for and anticipate a significant reduction in resources across all of our services and revising our workforce plan to tightly manage and achieve the right number of staff for our organisation.”

It adds that where the workforce review “generates surplus staff or resources, we intend to manage this through natural turnover, redeployment, and targeted retirement/voluntary severance”.