Scotland's council tax freeze will have cost over 100,000 public-sector jobs by the decade’s end, government union Unison warned yesterday.

It lamented the “impossible” demands placed on the Scottish budget by Westminster’s austerity agenda, with year-on-year inflation eroding the real-terms value of Holyrood’s war chest by around £3 billion since 2010.

The union’s The Cuts Don’t Work report said that around 50,000 public-sector jobs had vanished in Scotland since 2010, the report warned, with a further 60,000 job losses anticipated over the next five years as inflation swallowed up another £3.3bn.