Wiltshire Council leader Jane Scott has come under attack for failing to reveal before the council elections that it was about to make 400 staff redundant in a bid to save a minimum £4 million from its staffing budget.
The Conservative-controlled council, which has already made 630 staff redundant over the past three years, has now added another 400, the equivalent to 340 full-time jobs, just days after being returned to power.
Opposition councillors are demanding that Mrs Scott “should apologise” for not informing the electorate of its plans before voters went to the polls.
Lib-Dem leader Jon Hubbard says the failure to reveal the jobs cull is “tantamount to deception” at a time when the council is asking every single employee to consider taking voluntary redundancy before a final staffing assessment is made at the end of the summer.
Yet Tory councillors who fought and won the elections on May 2 did so on the basis that the council has been able to slash its staff numbers without hitting frontline services.
“They simply will not be able to pretend that they can make these job cuts without frontline services being impacted,” protested Councillor Hubbard. “It would be completely disingenuous to claim such a thing.”
Wiltshire’s child safeguarding department is still said to be in the equivalent of ‘special measures’ after it was found to be failing, and the council is in meltdown.
“But even more than that, it is tantamount to deception, frankly, to have announced this little more than one week after polling day,” declared Councillor Hubbard.
And Nick Fogg, newly-elected Marlborough independent councillor, told Marlborough News Online: “Sensible people will have taken the Conservative claims on the county finances before the last election with a rather large pinch of salt.
“It was fairly obvious that there would be a pay-back as soon as the last vote was safely gathered in and this is it. What has happened to the openness and transparency we’ve heard so much about. I realise that times are tough in local government?
“Failure to come clean makes them tougher for everybody.
If people are being made redundant, there’s bound to be a pay-off.”
A council spokesman denied the scale of the cuts had been kept from the electorate before the May 2 poll. “The budget agreed earlier this year made clear there would be £27 million of savings that needed to be found and it was obvious from that, that staffing costs would have to be part of that,” he explained.
Councillor Jane Scott told the Western Daily Press that it would not have been possible to outline the extent of the job losses before the election, since any incoming administration may not have pressed ahead with the plan. The job cuts are still only proposed, she insisted, with the plan having been drawn up by the council’s corporate directors in response to the demand to find £27 million in savings.
And due to be discussed at next week’s meeting of the council’s cabinet.
“Our number one priority is to protect frontline services which support the most vulnerable in our communities and we will continue to work innovatively to ensure this happens,” added the council spokesman.
“More people are depending on the services Wiltshire Council provides, and this, alongside a reduction in funding from central government means we need to continue to make savings.
“To do this we are looking at the longer-term picture and not just focusing on the year ahead. Therefore, we need to make savings of £27million this year and £123million over the next four years.
“We will continue to develop modern services around the needs of the customer and not merely rely on traditional and outdated methods of providing services.
“To ensure this happens we need to have the right people in the right posts and the right staffing structure. As well as proposing to reduce the number of posts, we will also be making savings by working more efficiently.”
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