Birmingham City Council has revealed it will axe up to 2,000 jobs during the next financial year.
The UK’s biggest local authority employer signalled the need to make efficiency savings of £69m by April 2011, in the first indication that local government cutbacks will hit frontline services.
In its 2010 financial plan, the council said between 1,500 and 2,000 posts would have to go. Chief executive, Stephen Hughes, revealed this figure could be higher, if a pay freeze was not agreed with unions.
But Unison general secretary, Dave Prentis, slammed the move, saying he would seek an immediate end to the plans.
‘It is absolutely wrong to push local government workers on to the dole queues. Birmingham must have its local government workers working – providing the vital services families in the community need to help them recover from the recession.’
Mr Hughes said the council aimed to put extra resources into services for the most vulnerable. But to do this, it had to make savings in what was already a ‘very difficult public sector spending context’.
He added that the authority wanted to do this without resorting to wide-scale compulsory redundancies.
‘We have already done this in the current financial year [and] every effort will be made to keep compulsory redundancies to an absolute minimum,’ he said. He pointed towards natural wastage, early retirement, voluntary redundancy and a mutually-agreed reduction in working hours as options currently being considered.
Dame Margaret Eaton, chairman of the Local Government Association, said councils were being hit by a ‘perfect storm caused by the recession’ as income dropped at a time when people increasingly turned to councils for help to get through tough times.
