SNP ministers are “gutting local communities,” Scottish Labour said today as it revealed cuts to council funding have led to libraries missing out on more than £250 million in the last decade.

The party cited figures from the Improvement Service’s local government benchmarking framework, which showed that by 2020-21, real-terms cumulative cuts to the net expenditure on libraries had hit £257,125,000.

This equates to a 36 per cent reduction in annual spending since 2010-11.