13 January 2011
Manchester City Council is seeking 2,000 rapid job losses, blaming what it calls one of the worst financial settlements in local government.
It must save £110m over the next year, £60m more than expected, and said
the cuts would total 25% over two years.
The Labour-controlled council said it ‘aims’ to honour its commitment to avoid compulsory redundancies, but the severity of the cuts meant it would have reduce its workforce quickly by some 17% through voluntary early retirement and voluntary redundancy.
Council leader Sir Richard Leese said: ‘The unfairness of the government’s financial grant settlement for Manchester, one of the five worst in the country, has been widely reported.
‘We now have to find £110m in savings next year because of front-loading and the redistribution of money from Manchester to more affluent areas.
‘The accelerated cuts mean we can no longer achieve the staffing reductions we have been forced into through natural turnover, which is why we are proposing a time-limited offer of voluntary severance and voluntary early retirement.’
Redundancy costs will reach some £60m, but are expected to yield an annual saving of £70m.
Unison’s regional organiser Frank Hont told Public Finance he was ‘shocked by the scale of the job cuts’, which he said arose from spending reductions that were ‘clearly part of an attack on deprived communities by the government’.
He said Manchester had been hit badly by a loss of grants that had been targeted on deprived areas.
But Hont acknowledged that the council had involved the union and had found £40m of non-staff spending reductions.
‘There is no fat there, the jobs that will go will hit people on the front line,’ he said.
The Unite trade union condemned the job cuts as ‘savage’.
Regional officer Keith Hutson said: ‘Our members are outraged. Unite will campaign to reverse these savage cuts which will hit some of the most vulnerable in society – but these cuts won’t impact on the bonus-riddled city elite that caused the financial crisis in the first place.’
The union would consider a consultative ballot for industrial action, he said.
Local Government Association chair Baroness Margaret Eaton said: ‘The unexpected severity of the cuts that will have to be made this year will put many councils in an unprecedented and difficult position. We have been clear that the level of spending reduction that councils are going to have to make goes way beyond anything that conventional efficiency drives, such as shared services, can achieve.
‘No council cuts jobs lightly, but many are being left with no choice. Some jobs will go in natural wastage, not filling vacancies and voluntary redundancy, however, we cannot escape the fact that some losses will be frontline posts that, given a choice, councils would not want to see go. These are the tough choices we are going to have to make.’
