THE EC Commissioner for Employment, Mr Padraig Flynn, yesterday

threatened tough action against the Scottish Office for advising

Ayrshire and Arran Health Board how to dodge a Community regulation.

The Irish commissioner told three Scottish Labour Euro-MPs: ''If

anyone is seeking to do violence to the regulation, then I will come

down on them very heavily.''

Mr Hugh McMahon, Labour Euro MP for Strathclyde West, asked for the

meeting with Mr Flynn to discuss revelations in The Herald that the

Scottish Office was privately advising the board how to circumvent and

minimise a Community regulation which protects the rights and conditions

of workers. Mr McMahon was accompanied by Mr Alex Smith (South of

Scotland) and Mr Henry McCubbin (North-East Scotland).

A leaked letter showed the Scottish Office was assisting the

management of the board to by-pass the Transfer of Undertakings

Regulation -- which is now part of UK law -- so that the pay and

conditions of board workers could be reduced when the operation opts out

of the health service and becomes a self-governing trust. EC law is

designed to prevent such moves.

Mr Flynn, who is Irish, has already been critical of the British

Government's hostile attitude to the Social Chapter of the Maastricht

Treaty and the controversial transfer of Digital jobs from Galway to

Ayr. He said that it was wrong for one EC member state ''to beggar

another''.

He told the three Scots yesterday that he was to have a meeting with

Mrs Gillian Shephard, the Employment Secretary, who is known to favour

scrapping the regulation although this would require a unanimous vote in

the Council of Ministers -- a distant prospect given the unpopularity of

the UK's social policy these days in Europe.

The Scottish Euro MPs said that they had encouraged Mr Flynn to take

legal action against the Government if the Scottish Office continued to

try to defy EC law.