Just before Christmas we had a consultation meeting about next year's budget cuts. We are coming to the end of a three month consultation period which will close on 6th January. There was an update from senior HR officers from each of the council's Directorates on the progress locally in making the cuts.
Birmingham is planning to cut a further £106 million from April 2012, on top of the £212 million cuts this year. The financial information is extremely complex and it is hard to get a real picture of what is happening.
This year's cuts (2011-2) included large savings to be made from reducing home to school transport for children with a range of needs; from tightening the eligibility criteria for receiving adult social care services; and from pushing down the contract rates for private adult social care services. But during the year, these plans have had to be dropped because of public opposition to cuts in school transport; because a judicial review ruled the consultation over social care criteria unlawful; and because the council says after the Southern Cross disaster, they can't squeeze independent sector care providers any harder.
So next year (2012-3), £65 million more cuts must be made to replace these three areas of cuts, plus £41 million other cuts some already planned for, others not. That's £106m, and as you can see it's complicated.
They had projected that these £106m cuts would mean up to 1,069 full time equivalent redundancies. But with some money being found elsewhere, some discovery of double counting of redundancies and with the use of voluntary redundancies, the numbers of potential compulsory redundancies have come down, perhaps to half this number or less. We are awaiting a full re-assessment of the current position on potential compulsory redundancies which is promised for the new year.
So we now ask the question - would it not be possible in an organisation with 16,500 staff to find alternative jobs for 500 or fewer people ? Can we not achieve 'no compulsory redundancies' next year ?
There are three strong weapons which can be used - another voluntary redundancy trawl, reduction of agency staff (still around £20 million plus this year) and reduced use of outside management consultants (still around £12 million this year).
Looking at the projected redundancies, there are several clusters of high levels of job losses. In Home Care 2-300 jobs are threatened. In Connexions 105 jobs are to go. In Childrens Services 140 jobs are to be cut. In the disabled work factory Shelforce, 87 would lose their jobs if Shelforce is closed. Some of these could be reduced by voluntary redundancies.
What's going on wioth these cuts? Why reduce well trained and high quality in-house Home Care when the standards of care in the private sector has just been lambasted by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission report ? Why savage Connexions with young people's unemployment at record rates ? Why threaten services for children in need in a city which has had a poor record of delivering a safe life for its children ? Why throw disabled people onto the dole and the mercy of the benefits system when the job market is in such a dire state ?
Surely we could put some more money into these critical services and also find alternative work in the council for those threatened with compulsory redundancy. Let's give people a little longer than the three months period on the 'Priority Movers' register to find another job in the council. Let's look closely at the skills of the potentially displaced and where they can be used elsewhere.
If the will was there, a council of the size and resourcefulness of Birmingham could do all these things and thereby give a guarantee of no compulsory redundancy even for just a year. The payback in terms of staff morale and higher committment would be immense.
But the will is not there. The council decision makers are obsessed with the bottom line of financial spreadsheets and don't pay enough attention to the misery of the real people who are being made compulsorily redundant.
So next year we must fight together for a more humane approach. It is perfectly possible to achieve. It just requires the will.
Graeme Horn, Joint Branch Secretary
No comments:
Post a Comment