‘Minimal impact’ vow over £2m Shropshire cuts
Sunday 13th June 2010, 12:51AM BST.
Shirehall leader Keith Barrow has promised county residents that there will be “minimal impact” on services they receive from Shropshire Council despite Government funding cuts of more than £2 million.
The council was already looking at making cash savings this year and in future years.
And while the funding cuts have come earlier, and were bigger than expected, the authority believes it is well placed to manage the implications.
The Government has also said that there are to be no council tax increases next year. The biggest hit to the council’s budget is education where it is going to lose £1.7 million. In total about 30 different areas of council work will be affected.
But Councillor Barrow said: “Shropshire Council has been aware that we were facing possible cuts in our budgets for some time, and has already been working hard to identify ways in which we can tackle the potential problem.
“As a responsible council, we want to assure our residents and local businesses that we have anticipated and planned for these cuts and, through prudent financial planning, we will aim to minimise any impact to the essential frontline services.
“We are committed to ensuring that there is no increase in council tax in the next year, and although this is a challenging time, we believe that by working efficiently with our partners and by listening to our residents, we can continue to make Shropshire a great place to work, live and visit.”
The cuts also mean the council’s cashpot for improving road safety is to be reduced by £187,000, while a total of £173,000 is to be cut from administration costs.
Telford & Wrekin Council has also been told it will be getting its targeted funding cut by more than £1.7 million this year as the new coalition Government looks to slash Britain’s spiralling deficit. Some £1.5 million of the cuts will be in its education department, £91,000 saved in administration costs and its road safety funding reduced by £79,000.
This week Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles said the axe will fall on funding in each English council area, but he added core Government funding for councils will remain untouched, including cash for schools, to protect frontline services and prevent council tax rises.
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It was recently reported that half a dozen Shropshire Council executives earn more than the prime minister including the top dog on an eye watering £180000 per year of tax payers money yet when cuts are anounced it is the services that are cut (£1.7m from education) no thought of getting rid of some of the £100k per year non jobs
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there is plenty of slack there to cut, half the number of senior managers for example, get rid of the faceless call centre and merge rural primary schools, that alone will save a few million
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i dont see how 2 £ mill can be “minimal”
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This is smoke and mirrors surely?
This particular ‘£2 million’ figure relates to ‘targeted’ funding, and is a drop in the ocean to what the council will actually have to find in savings/cuts.
Is this administration totally naive, or do they think the public are?
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i think thats a fair comment, Shropshrie councils annual budgets is 600 M £ ++++ so 2 m is like less than half a percent!! nothing, every business in the Uk is cutting back on management, pay, bonues, marketing, luxuries and admin etc, so lets all do it the same, there is teachers in Shropshire on £35 grand a year who work less than 50% of the days of the year, lets start there and make them earn their living in the summer holidays too through marking exams or comign into the school to run summer clubs and such, also attack the bloated LEA with its advisors on 50K + expenses who dont teach but merely reasearch the curriculum and issue advice to schools on all sorts of H&S and equal opportunity type nonsense
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OMG – i just done the maths and with 6 weeks summer hols, 2 weeks easter, 2 weeks xmas, 2 x 1 week half term, 52 weekends and 8 bank holidays plus the standard 30 days annual PAID leave in the public sector that 226 DAYS OFF A YEAR!!! Wow so they only work 139 days a year – less than half the year – WOW!!
NOT BAD LIFE HEY and a final salary pension and above national average starting salary for a bonus!!! No wonder the council is skint it employs thousands of them!
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What planet are you on? Standard 30 days leave a year, where the hell have you plucked that figure from? And those holiday weeks you refer to may apply in education, but are definitely not standard across the whole public sector.
Above average starting salary? How about you attempt to base your comment on fact instead of fiction. Maybe you’d care to put in a freedom of information request to find out exactly how many employees start their careers on an above average salary. The answers may surprise you, but then I suppose that would be too much like hard work for someone who obviously bases their comments on pure fantasy.
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it is true in the public sector you start on minimum 25 days paid annual leave then accrue one a year for the next 10 years until in some senior mandarin / cheif exec / director of councils type posts you get 35 days paid annual leave
remember even the private sector at McDonalds you have to get 21 days paid annual leave as anorm now so 25-30 is what is standard in the public sector and so if a teacher has done long service they will be on 30 days paid leave FACT
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Wrong again – you have chosen to apply your comment to the whole of the public sector. Whilst the 30 days leave may be the case for teachers, (I don’t know, so will not comment on that) it absolutely is not the case across the whole sector as your comment and that of Jimmy 5 suggests.
For your information, I started with 23 days entitlement which is FACT and not fiction unlike some quotes which appear to have been plucked out of thin air.
Granted, that’s more than the 21 days leave you state is standard across the private sector,(I’ll have to take your word on that) but it’s less than the 28 days leave allowance I received during my lengthy time in private sector employment. However, I am grateful for whatever I can get.
If quibbling over a few days leave appears petty, then I apologise. Unfortunately it is necessary in order to attempt to dispel more of the fantasies and downright lies which regularly appear in threads relating to the public sector.
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i work as a council employee, not in shropshire but another local one, and any way I started with 25 days annual leave, i have been there 5 years and just accrued my first ‘extra’ days leave for long service so im now on 26 a year, as i understand it i will get another next year and so on for another 5 years for a maximum of 30 days annual leave, so I need to have done about 10 years service by which time i’ll be in my 40′s to get 30 days per annum
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Tee hee – it appears that teachers can’t be that good in Shropshire if they are producing the sort of person jimmy 5 is. He obviously hasn’t got a grasp of the real world yet. Maybe if he took the time to find out the facts rather than making up such rubbish he may be pleasantly surprised. I have to say though – if you are jealous of the money teachers make and the time off they have (generally to make up for working weekends etc during term time – I know I married a teacher!) then why don’t you get a job as a teacher yourself?? Could it be that you are not up to it perhaps??
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i would like to see cuts more like 200 million, this doesnt go far enough, we need to get the benefits and housing estate cutlure over for good, people must stand on their own two feet and not use the state to do it for them
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Clearly its the education sector which accounts for something like 40-50% of the entire council budget which must feel the pinch the most, jimmys points though a bit ott are correct about teachers pay and conditions sadly they have a choice, either accept some reductions in this or there will be a reduction in the number of teachers, you cannot have both
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Teachers do not get the 30 days (where do you get that figure?) annual paid leave on top of the 13+ weeks a year but they are treated differently than other public service workers insofar as their salaries are not advertised as all others in the public realm. This is a lack of transparency and wrong.
If you add on the shorter day and sick leave then yes they are very expensive and judging by the real level of aptitude of leavers (not using exam results to make that estimation) there is somthing going wrong here.
For a start off why are banks so keen to lend to teachers, why do so many have second homes/holidays abroad/second jobs and why do so many of their children go to private schools?
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its true eva they do
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Or jump aboard their barges and motorhomes. But their time is coming…and they know it. The pensions reaper has woken.
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£2 million is peanuts it wouldnt even cover the coffee and cakes budget for most council meetings, stop wasting paper clips and print on both sides and you can find that kind of saving in a single department of most councils and i say that as some one who worked in local and central government for 20 years and believes they do a great job in many ways but being focused on the job not on profit/cost means of course they take their eye off the ball in terms of cost and can spend mroe than they need to sometimes
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one thing they need to spend more on is the terrible pot holes if there is no money i would like to see consideration of privatising many roads and make bridges toll bridges, we must have more investment in roads we are rural and its more cost effective than public transport
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sack them all and cut my taxes now please
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If £2m in cuts makes a minimal impact why the heck were they spending it in the first place and how much more could they save and still have minimal impact, plus imagine that saved for every council countrywide!
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why is every one so anti public sector in this blog – hello they teach your kids, if you think its so easy give up work and teach them at home – its a tough job and you need a degree for it, indeed a post grad degree these days so damn right you better start on a paltry 25 k and have some scope to double that in the longer term or why would you do it
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i am concerned to here meole golf club is for sale / for development,
there are better ways to save than this
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Quite. Why aren’t more people outraged that the quality of life for us and future generations in OUR town is dictated by a few ‘here today gone tomorrow’ councillors and their buddy ‘developers’.
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this is a wealthy tory so of course there will be minimal impact for him, he doesnt use the NHS hes with Bupa, he doesnt care if local kids have 50 pupils in their class because his kids are off to eton and oxbridge, he doesnt really even mind the pot holes in the road that much because his 4×4 cruises over them and he can afford regular services, in essence the cuts arent going to touch him and his lot, it will be the poor in council houses who see rent going up, the obese trying to swim off their fat who have to pay more of travel further when pools close, it will be the mental health patients who get less social care and the handicap who will have to wash them selves at home in future
no these cuts will not be minimal not for real people
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i would like to see more money spent on frontline services like waste collection, in other parts of the country you get weekly collections and more plastics should be recycled
cuts must come for the sake of the bankers debt i appreciate but not from frontline , cut the pensions of all the staff instead that would be fairer
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i think it just shows you have some one ( a tory of course) who just doesnt care about public services, for these rich people, the public sector is just a leach but for the majority they are vital services which we need to get to work, look after our nan, borrow books for the kids and all that
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[need a degree for it, indeed a post grad degree these days so damn right you better start on a paltry 25 k and have some scope to double that in the longer term or why would you do it]
Many professional post grad jobs with the council start on £15k and after several years you can get the average for Shropshire which is £25k. That would be for a longer week and initially 22 days holiday eventually building up to 28/30 days. This point out to my mind the clear reason for transparency in the pay for education jobs there is no justification to their salaries not being advertised like everyone elses.
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teachers are comparable to lawyers! starting on 25 K i think not, they work a 6 hour day and as you say lots of holiday
that is not comparable to a layer or other professsions wehere common to work 70 hr weeks
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Teachers start on about 19k, need to have at least one degree and further degree training to become a teacher. This is slightly less than the average graduate starting wage.
6 Hours a day? People think that a teacher walks in to school at the first bell teach until school closes 5 hours later and that’s it until the next day.
I start at 8 o’clock in the morning, leave the building at 5 o’clock that night and often still do work in the evenings/weekends.
Ask a teacher and you will find most are like this.
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i agree there is alot of back office functions like admin and the call centre which could go tommorrow and the roads would still get swept and the kids in school taught, the LEA is a “dripping roast” and duplicates the department for education so should be the main place to find savings
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btw, a teaching certificate is barely a post graduate “degree” and is not like an MBA or an MA in terms of cost, difficulty or qualification quality at all
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So how long did it take you to get yours? Which did you do first – your MBA or your teaching certificate? I’m curious as they are very different and it’s rare to see someone with both who can make an educated comparison. You do have both I presume…
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A lot of people do not seem to realise that many of the posts working for the council are graduate jobs.I can never understand why teachers are compared to lawyers and doctors when their job is far more equable to nurses,planners,highway consultants,arboriculturalists, social workers, police. archaeologists. IT,envionmental,ecological consultants …..
Solicitors,architects and medical practitioners have to study for seven years and then they have to work very long hours so I can see little comparison to the teaching profession.
Loacl Government officers are also often subject to threatening behaviour and abuse in their daily work.
Teaching salaries need to as transparent as other council posts.
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i think alot of anti public sector rhetoric is just envy, if you have such poor conditions in the private sector – change jobs or do what we did form a trade union and fight for your rights
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This isnt anti public sector, its far more simple than that.
The public sector is employed by us, the tax payers, to provide services. When there have to be cuts it should not be the services that are cut first. It should be the overpaid top dogs with thier fancy titles for non jobs. How can they justify taking more money than the prime minister. This rather shoots down the old chestnuts of ‘job size’ and comparible jobs in the private sector.
Shropshire Star – please reprint the article on the money being taken by those at the top of Shropshire Council to remind us all where our money is going while they make cuts in education.
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Whilst I wouldn’t disagree with much of what you say there Salopian, it is true that there is always a strong anti public sector sentiment throughout many of these blogs. No matter how tenuous the link, someone, somewhere will always manage to get a swipe or two in.
As Sally states, maybe this is down to envy – though I have no idea why. I personally feel much of it is down to people basing opinions on how things used to be. We’ve changed massively; it’s a shame those commentators seem unable to do the same.
There is also the issue of taxes which you have touched on. When the media chooses to highlight the things that go wrong or cost money, and rarely gives coverage to things that go right, then you can almost hear the howls of indignation across the country as Mr or Ms Angry races to their PC to pass frequently inaccurate, poorly perceived judgements with little or no research into the actual facts.
You only have to look at recent stories concerning an HGV fire on the A5 (in particular comments 36 and 37), and the report on Shropshire Council’s jobs freeze to get an idea of what I mean.
I wouldn’t dream of passing judgement on the reponsibilities of others if I have no knowledge of their jobs, so why do private sector employees level baseless inaccuracies, myths and lies at the public sector employee?
Having worked in both sectors, let me assure readers that poor management, laziness and incompetence is absolutely not confined to the public sector alone.
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Mark, I take it from your reply that you are public sector, maybe I touched a nerve? I have no qualms commenting on other peoples jobs as I have been in both sectors and have seen the money that is squandered in both, the difference with public sector money is that it comes from our taxes – anther reson why I feel qualified and justified to voice an opinion.
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salopian – you may have noticed but erm the private sector is funded from our taxes too! note – export subsidies, common agricultural programme, state owned banks, subsidies and grants galore for start up SME’s , VAT free energy for steel industry, low cost loans for investment banks QE etc etc
Get real dude! The public sector workers are often working for the love of the job or the people, you dont become a social worker, a copper or a planner because you think wow i can get really rich here and its a great life, if you wanted to do that you’d become a banker or something
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Sally, if life is so tough in the public sector , why not go over to the private sector or start your own business….oh sorry, you wouldn’t have the qualifications/know-how to do it…sorry!
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Mark,
as someone who has worked for local authorities, private sector and now for myself and still have friends who work for local councils, my experience shows that there are bad management in both private and public sector jobs but the poor performance /pound paid in wages, award, has to go to the public sector. Admitedly there are some hard working, poorly paid public sector workers but a whole lot more who wouldn’t be missed, don’t deserve the wage they are on and probably wouldn’t last five minutes if they had to run their own business.
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The biggest surprise for me with these teacher responces is that Andrew ” teacher bashing” Finch hasn’t done some more bashing!!
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Salopian – I’m not entirely sure that you’ve understood the points I was trying to make. I wasn’t actually disagreeing with most of what you said, and I believe I had made it clear that I am a public sector employee (I’ve also worked privately for a long time, and still do).
What I was trying to take issue with is the regular anti public sector comments which are displayed almost daily. Your first sentence states that you don’t believe that this is public sector bashing. Previous comments show that it clearly is and I was pointing out that as per usual, anything to do with public sector is often met with inaccurate comments, lies and fantasy – this was not an accusation I was aiming at your answer.
Roadrunner – that’s your experience, fair enough. You also raise some points which I could not disagree with. My personal experience however leads me to the conclusion that there really is not too much difference these days in the way that both sectors are managed, and maybe that’s what some people find so hard to accept.
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