Almost £1000 of public money will be spent on providing the free meals - soup, turkey and all the trimmings for members of the Inverness city committee on Monday and similar fare for all 80 councillors at the full Highland Council meeting on Thursday, when savings of more than £8 million across four departments will be the main agenda item.

Some council workers - who had to pay for their own Christmas dinner two days ago - have criticised the move at a time when jobs could be under threat. "It must be nice to go from cutting jobs to cutting turkey," said one worker, who wished to remain anonymous.

He called on his employers to cancel at least one of the lunches and donate the savings to the city's homeless.

Cuncillors will be asked to agree £2.8 million savings for 2010/11. The cash would come from the chief executive's service (£1.694 million), the finance department (£331,000), housing and property (£535,000) and planning and development (£313,000). A further £2.516 million would be cut from these departments in 2011/12 and another £2.643 million in 2012/13..

The issue will be chewed over between the traditional three-course festive lunch, Savings proposed for the three other larger departments - education, culture and sport, social work, and transport, environmental and community services - will be considered on 11th February, when the local authority is expected to confirm its budget for 2010/11. .

Unison representative and council worker Shane Manning declined to comment on the free lunches but said the union aimed to work with officials to ensure every penny of the local authority's £598 million budget was spent wisely.

"Unison is very conscious that every pound has to be counted," he stated.

"We want to reduce the impact on our membership.".

The council's Inverness city manager David Haas could not say whether officials had considered making savings by cancelling Monday's festive dinner the Town House.

"I'm not going to get into that," he said.

"We provide lunch anyway because of the timing of the meetings." The authority's opposition SNP group will propose on Thursday that future meetings begin at 1pm rather than 10.30am in a bid to cut the food bill. Councillor Drew Hendry plans to raise the matter and also wants members to contribute towards refreshments.

Currently a free lunchtime buffet is provided during committee meetings for around 25 councillors each time, while at full council meetings a cooked meal is available for free to all 80 elected members, who are paid salaries ranging from £16,234 to £37,880.

The Inverness Courier revealed in October that the local authority spent £88,591.96 on supplying refreshments for meetings in 2008/09 - an increase of £6840 on the previous year. The total also includes public ward forum meetings and in-house training.

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