THE NEW leader of Glasgow City Council has vowed to make tackling the janitors’ dispute one of her first priorities.

The SNP’s Susan Aitken told the Evening Times she hopes to meet jannies and trade unions “as soon as possible” to resolve their pay problems, as well as get started on tackling long-running equal pay claims.

Ms Aitken said: “It is a promise I made to [the janitors], so I want to fulfill it as soon as I can.

“I want to come to an agreement with them that they are happy with, that everybody is happy with, so we can all move forward.

“I’ve said to the trade unions and to the jannies themselves that is

what I would do and I’m sticking to that.”

Along with tackling the janitorial dispute, Ms Aitken said her party will immediately start applying to rejoin the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA).

Glasgow City Council left the body in 2015 to join a rival organisation, along with a number of other councils.

Ms Aitken said: “We want to rejoin COSLA, pretty much right away.

“We will start having those conversations [today].

“Myself and councillor David McDonald [Glasgow City Council deputy leader ] have already had informal conversations with COSLA before the election so we can now formalise those and set in motion the process of Glasgow rejoining.”

Ms Aitken, who is only the second woman to ever lead Glasgow City Council, secured the top position following the local election results on Friday.

Today she will move in to the leader’s office at the City Chambers despite her party failing to secure the 43 seats needed to form a majority administration in Glasgow.

Over the weekend, her party held a group meeting at which members were “absolutely elated” about the results, said Ms Aitken, who described her party’s victory as “historic”.

The lack of a majority, she said, is “absolutely nothing to fear” and added she does “not regard that as a setback in any way at all.”

She plans to hold informal discussions with the Green party this week, in the hope of coming to an “informal” agreement on how they can work together to push through their policies.

“I will be talking to the Greens

this week, but what the outcome of that will be I don’t know. “ she explained.

“There is probably quite a lot of common ground we can discuss.

“We are not going in with any pre-determined agenda, searching for a formal coalition.

“I haven’t had the conversations yet but I suspect a less formal arrangement is what we will come up with.

“Our manifesto was very strong on sustainability and carbon reduction and I hope the Greens will think there’s plenty of our policies that they can support as well.”

The new council leader also appealed to Glasgow’s 31 Labour councillors to be a “constructive opposition”.

She said: “I think it would be a mistake for Labour to continue in the kind of negative vein that they conducted this campaign.

Clearly they lost this election, they were rejected by the people of Glasgow as the administration and I think part of that is to do with their very negative and obstructive approach.

“If they choose to take a different path, perhaps under new leadership, and attempt to be a more constructive opposition, then I think they have an opportunity to rebuild and we would be happy to talk to them and work with them on an issue-by-issue basis.