THE erosion of services directly provided by Scottish Borders Council is due to continue in October when 80 information and communications technology (ICT) staff will be transferred to a private company.

That is the recommendation of a review which will be presented in private to councillors at Newtown on April 2.

The company, which will be selected by competitive tender, will meet all the ICT needs of both SBC and Edinburgh City Council whose existing outsourcing arrangement with BT is coming to an end.

Under the proposal, the SBC staff will transfer with their terms and conditions intact for one year.

Affected employees were briefed on the results of the study on Tuesday and told, in so many words, that the service was underperforming.

The main trade union involved, Unite, slammed the proposal, its regional industrial officer Tony Trench claiming: “It could be the next step to an independent Borders local authority vanishing altogether and being subsumed by Edinburgh.” A trend of in-house services being outsourced by SBC has already been established.

On April 1, a new organisation SB Cares will take over all adult care provision, involving 1,000 full and part-time staff, and later this year, libraries, museums, public halls and other so-called cultural services, along with 300 employees, are likely to be transferred to the stand-alone trust which runs the region’s sports facilities.

One member of staff, Lee Myers, IT security officer at SBC, put his head above the parapet on Wednesday with an emailed appeal to councillors to reject the transfer and to authorise a “Plan B”.

“There is a solution out there that would be far more beneficial to SBC other than outsourcing,” said Mr Myers.  “We all agree that service to customers needs to be improved, but please consider that IT is drastically understaffed and we have done what we can on a two-tier support system.  “The money that is being wasted on outsourcing would be far better invested in improving the department and taking on more staff so we can provide a better service to customers.”