Politicians and council officials have been condemned by Scotland’s spending watchdog over a plan to hand a local-authority chief executive a £149,000 redundancy payment just months before he was due to retire.

Many complaints from children being abused at Kerelaw were written off as lies, it was admitted yesterday. Glasgow City Council last week said it believed a hard core of around 40 members of staff at the school had physically or sexually abused children in their care.

{mosimage}Yesterday it admitted that many of the victims had reported their experiences to social workers or other professionals but had been ignored.

Glasgow ran the residential unit in Stevenston, Ayrshire, until it was shut amid a police and council abuse investigation early last year. Twenty workers have been reported to the procurator-fiscal on abuse and other charges.

David Comley, the authority’s head of social work, yesterday told councillors there had been a failure of management at the school and in the council itself and that worrying reports from children had not been heeded.

Mr Comley said: “It is clear in retrospect that a number of children had made complaints about their treatment in Kerelaw. These complaints, for whatever reason, have not been taken appropriately seriously enough.

“What tended to happen was that complaints have been written off as being likely to be untrue without any proper investigation having been carried out. We need to be extremely careful about not doing that.”

He added: “Nobody seems to have looked at the overall picture and said there seems to be a systematic problem here’.”

Councils routinely receive complaints from unhappy children in care, many of which turn out to be untrue or malicious. However, Mr Comley said, should not mean that they are not investigated.

Mr Comley, who will retire this year, was speaking at a meeting of one of the new committees set up by the council to develop and scrutinise policy after the controversial introduction of cabinet-style government last year.

AT LEAST half the people in Scotland suspected of having been part of a massive international paedophile ring that traded child-abuse images on the internet will not be prosecuted, The Scotsman understands.

Every three and four-year-old in Scotland will be entitled to an extra five weeks free nursery education from August under Scottish Executive plans to be announced today.

Cancer patients are being forced to research and arrange for a pioneering form of treatment in England because it is not being routinely offered in Scotland, it was claimed last night.

A woman who was sexually abused by her foster father is to sue the council chiefs who put her in his care. Sianne McLeod was 14 when she was placed in the care of William Alexander, a convicted sex offender.

Services for the mentally ill in Inverness face disruption as 50 social work managers consider industrial action over their claim for special allowance payments.

The number of people in Scotland diagnosed with alcoholic liver disease has doubled in a decade. Information released to the Scots Tories in response to a parliamentary question, showed figures in some areas had trebled and even quadrupled.

Scientists in Dundee carrying out research into asthma believe they have made a breakthrough which could alter the treatment of the condition. The University of Dundee team announced last year that they had identified the gene producing the protein filaggrin which causes asthma and eczema.

More than 90,000 children in Scotland live in “severe poverty”, according to a study by Save the Children (STC). The charity has classified that just under 10% of the country’s one million youngsters as living in its worst poverty bracket.