Edinburgh council to axe 700 jobs by April

Published on Friday 15 January 2010 10:18

UP to 700 city council jobs are facing the axe within months as part of a major cost-cutting exercise.

And council chiefs have written to every employee, asking them to consider taking unpaid holidays or going part time to help meet a budget deficit.

The council said the equivalent of 700 full-time positions will have to go by April, as it faces a deficit of more than 90 million over the next three years.

Several hundred council posts are expected to be cut by natural wastage, reducing overtime and ending temporary contracts. However, the council estimates it could still face having to make around 230 of its near 20,000-strong workforce redundant.

All staff – including teachers, manual workers, office and care workers – yesterday received an e-mail urging them to consider changes to help the cash-strapped authority make ends meet.

The e-mail outlined options including moving to part-time, job share or term-time work only, taking additional unpaid leave, such as one extra day off a month, or taking an unpaid career break or long holiday.

The move has been labelled as "astonishing naivety" by union leaders.

In the e-mail, Jim Inch, director of corporate services at the city council, said: "Managers will do all they can to support you in this, because flexible working is a way of offering a real benefit to staff while also limiting the need to consider reductions in jobs and services.

"However, while all reasonable efforts will be made to secure redeployment for surplus employees, it is likely that some redundancies will still be necessary."

John Stevenson, president of the Edinburgh branch of trade union Unison, said: "We are astonished that this e-mail has gone out. We don't know where it will apply, or how the work that goes on normally will continue if people accept it. It is astonishing naivety.

"Will it apply to bin men? Will it apply to residential social workers? There is a range of issues that have not been thought through and that they have not talked to us about.

"Some people might be quite keen to take a career break but it is what it means for those that are left over that we are worried about."

The council is also proposing a series of other measures in a bid to reduce the number of redundancies required.

Hundreds of staff will be offered the option of taking up early retirement, while the council is also investigating the redeployment of staff in job roles that could be made redundant to other roles.

Under the early retirement plans, staff would also receive an early release payment of 1.5 weeks' pay for every year of continuous local government service, up to a maximum of 45 weeks' pay and a cap of 30,000. Members of the Local Government Pension Scheme who are aged over 50 may also be eligible for the immediate release of pension benefits.

City leader Jenny Dawe believes early retirement could help reduce redundancies. She said: "That is not saying that there will be masses of people in the position where they feel pressure on them to take early retirement up but the offer will be there.

"We are still in the process of deciding on specifics.

"Clearly this is something we want to work with staff on but some staff may be keen to take up early retirement."

COUNCIL'S FUNDING GAP ON INCREASE

THE city council's funding gap has grown, new figures have revealed.

City council officials have been expecting to face a gap in their finances of around 90 million in the next three years but a new analysis shows that the figure has now grown to 94.2m.

The gap comes despite the council's grant for 2010-11 from the Scottish Government increasing by 1.76 per cent to 810.9m.

Donald McGougan, the city council's director of finance, said: "Despite the modest increase in grant, the council will require to make significant reductions in budgets next year.

"This is as a result of requiring to make provision in the long-term financial plan for increases in provision for issues such as pay and pensions, issues relating to increases in numbers of elderly, vulnerable children and people with disabilities, non-domestic rates due to the recent re-evaluation (and] increased care home fees."