Edinburgh City Council is preparing to shed more than 3,000 jobs and privatise services, as it accelerates action to cut budgets and save in excess of £140 million, according to a union.

The public sector union Unison said it feared the cuts - amounting to one in every six Edinburgh council staff - would see more work contracted out and an end to all but core service provision.

The figures dwarf those already reported for Glasgow City Council which also requires to make savings in excess of £100 million, as the Herald reported last October.

Unison said anticipated cuts of £107m in Edinburgh over the next three to four years would instead be some £34m higher, due to overspends on essential services such as health and social care over the last year. Meanwhile they were to be front-loaded, a spokesman said, with £60m in cuts needing to be found from April 1st 2016.

New council chief Executive Andrew Kerr, who took up post in July, has already said the timetable for cuts will have to be accelerated. Earlier this year, Edinburgh City Council said more than 1,200 posts were set to be lost over the next three years, to help deal with a £67m budget hole, and that this could be achieved without compulsory redundancies.

However revised plans are expected to be put before the city's Finance and Resources Committee next week and the council is to hold a briefing today (Thursday) about its proposals.

John Stevenson, president of Unison's Edinburgh branch, said the figure of 3,000 job losses had not been disputed by council officials. "They told us it could well be more," he said. Mr Stevenson added that it was increasingly hard to see how compulsory redundancies could be avoided, and controversial privatisation plans rejected by the council in 2012 could be resurrected.

The union has been in talks with management over plans for 'transformational' restructuring, but the job losses now being talked about are more than three times what the union had been expecting. Council officials were warning that salami-slicing would no longer bring about the savings needed Mr Stevenson said. However the city's politicians may yet reject or modify the plans.

"If there is the political will to save Edinburgh's services from these vicious government cuts, then councillors need to make sure that officials fully understand that," Mr Stevenson added.

He said the Scottish Government should step in with emergency funding while a fairer funding system for councils was negotiated. "There has been a deafening silence on the massive cuts local councils have faced with 40,000 jobs lost in the last few years. The government needs to face up to the crisis and make funding available before services disappear forever."

Cllr Alasdair Rankin, Finance Convener for the City of Edinburgh Council, confirmed that a statement about the cuts being planned would be made on Thursday: “The Council has been clear about the scale of the financial challenge facing us for years. The city’s population is growing and demand for Council services is higher than ever," he said.

“We need to make very substantial savings over the next four years and we have already put in place a number of key measures to achieve the required efficiencies.

“The Council needs to ensure we continue to deliver quality frontline services as efficiently and effectively as possible. No one ever said this was going to be easy or straightforward but we want to safeguard those services as much as possible. Realistically, to make the necessary savings, we have little option but to consider reducing the number of people who work for the Council. Bearing in mind we are keenly aware that this is about people we will work closely with our staff and the trade unions during this difficult time."

“We are very clear about the size of the challenge and over the coming days we will be outlining our proposed next steps.”