Wirral Council Consultation: What Really Matters (Part 2)

An opinion piece on staff cuts at Wirral Council and the current consultation.

English: Wallasey Town Hall, Wirral, England a...
English: Wallasey Town Hall, Wirral, England as seen from the promenade. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

OPINION BY JOHN BRACE: Well as promised at last Thursday’s Cabinet meeting, Wirral Council has published its option papers for part two of the What Really Matters consultation.

As explained on the website the options are about 25% more than the savings required (so the consultation is really about the 25% of things Wirral Council does in the options the public would like to save). Despite stating on their website that the consultation lasts until January 31st 2013, some decisions will be have to be made at the special Cabinet meetings on December 20th 2012 to comply with legal requirements on consultation with the workforce.

There will be more unspecified “consultation events” and of course staff/trade union consultation too. What does this mean for staff working in service areas identified as a budget option? It means basically one of two things if you’re an employee in a service area that’s become an “option”:-

(a) you’ll could be lucky this year and end up in the 25% of options that aren’t cut, due to public/staff support in this current consultation or other reasons (but this doesn’t rule out your post being cut in future years),

(b) once the special Cabinet meeting (followed by the Employment and Appointments Committee) of 20th December 2012 meets your job could be at risk under the new (recently approved) less generous redundancy scheme

How many jobs will go at Wirral Council as a result of this? Well the law requires this kind of consultation for over twenty redundancies, the real figure partly depends on a bunch of decisions yet to be made, however if you add the predicted shortfall of £25.4 million next year to the current required in-year savings of £13.2 million, you get £38.6 million.

Obviously not all the £38.6 million will be staff’s salaries and some staff are directly employed by schools. These figures are based on full-time equivalents, as Wirral Council employs a lot of part-time workers, the real figures could be higher than this estimate.

However by my rough estimates it would be around 154 to 1,026 FT employees that will need to go to balance the books. With those types of numbers involved it won’t just the normal reasons people leave and there will have to be redundancies. The specifics of who, how many and which service areas has yet to be decided (apart from some Executive Team decisions on the current in year savings).

134 Boundary Road, Bidston, CH43 7PH

Author: John Brace

New media journalist from Birkenhead, England who writes about Wirral Council. Published and promoted by John Brace, 134 Boundary Road, Bidston, CH43 7PH. Printed by UK Webhosting Ltd t/a Tsohost, 113-114 Buckingham Avenue, Slough, Berkshire, England, SL1 4PF.

4 thoughts on “Wirral Council Consultation: What Really Matters (Part 2)”

  1. Late on parade here John. Just to let you know that the link to the option papers for What Really Matters part II (near top of page) doesn’t seem to be working. The council’s search facilities are predictably pathetic, and I fear only Wirral Council could pull this off…..

    (e.g. typing in “what really matters” or even “consultation” returns a fat zero……..

    1. Thanks for pointing that out, the link was right when I wrote it, but Wirral Council seem to have taken the chief executive bit out of the address of the page, moved the same page to a different address and are not redirecting from the old page to the new. So I’ve changed what the link links to so it goes to the new page. Hopefully that explains things, but it’s a very odd thing to do in the middle of a consultation isn’t it?

  2. It is John. Many thanks. I was writing a blog post on the latest consultation and was looking to refer back to how unrepresentative of the Wirral population the first one was, and the lack of proportion and perspective.

    1. Last week, I was at the three policy and performance committees, which each received a powerpoint presentation on how the What Really Matters consultation was going (which I think included figures on how many returned questionnaires they got). I’m sure the video is on my Youtube channel. If you have trouble finding it (the presentation was at the start so it should be part 1 of each meeting here are direct links to each part 1.

      Families and Wellbeing Policy and Performance Committee 4th November 2013 (budget consultation) Part 1
      Regeneration and Environment Policy and Performance Committee 5th November 2013 (budget consultation)
      Transformation and Resources Policy and Performance Committee 6th November 2013 (budget consultation)

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