Shropshire Council plans £60m cuts over three years
Wednesday 14th July 2010, 12:17PM BST.
Budgets are to be slashed by almost £60 million by Shropshire Council over the next three years, it was announced today.
Shirehall chiefs said it would lead to a radical change in the way services would be delivered with a strong possibility some could be offloaded to the voluntary and community sectors, as well as businesses.
Bosses say job losses are inevitable as the council grapples with a severe squeeze on spending from Government, coupled with a freeze on council tax rises.
But with a recruitment freeze in place, they said that they hoped to manage losses through “natural wastage” rather than redundancies.
The unprecedented scale of the financial challenges facing the authority will be highlighted in three reports to its cabinet next week.
Savings
The most immediate task for the cabinet will be to consider how to tackle initial cuts of almost £10 million which need to be made quickly as a result of losing Government grants.
In addition to the £10 million loss of grant funding, the council needs to make savings over the next three years of at least £47 million.
Kim Ryley, Shropshire Council chief executive, said today: “The council has no wish to add to Shropshire’s unemployment figures in the recession by making staff redundant, but we will need to reduce the size of our workforce.
“Shropshire Council has already made large savings through the change to an unitary authority and through careful management of our finances.
“We believe that we can achieve the further savings that are required of us but we will need to make some difficult choices about which services we provide.
“With the help of local residents, partner organisations and businesses, we can determine the most appropriate way to run these services in future, whether that is by the council directly, or through our partner organisations in the voluntary or private sectors, or by local people doing more themselves.”
The council cabinet will be meeting every month until Christmas to review all council spending in depth to enable it to take early decisions on where cuts should be made from next April.
By Dave Morris
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Bankers in London created this crisis and the public sector are the fall guys.
This has given the Tories the opporunity they have always wanted whilst their banking and tax dodging buddies live the high life.
Well done to those of you who voted Blue and shame on those Lib Dems who endorse this. Nothing much fair about this coalition!
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I couldnt agree more!
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The money used to bail out RBS, Northern Rock and Lloyds/HBOS is chump change compared to the cost of pensions for the public sector and the armed forces
Bank Bashing has had it’s day anyway as the focus is now on our past government overspending taxpayers money on too many public sector ‘non-jobs’ and white elephant projects and the need to tighten things up.
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Bankers across the World and primarily the USA and I agree with all your other comments
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Perhaps if money was not being wasted hand over fist across the council and county services then this probably would be less.
One question I do have is how much is the project costing to keep digging up harlescott traffic lights? (This has happened twice in recent years and no improvements yet have been seen by anyone I know)……
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I also agree. but it would be naive in the extreme to assume that the cuts will be limited to public sector employees. Whilst much of the dogma behind these cuts is designed to privatise our public services, don’t forget that many council services are already ‘outsourced’ to the private sector.
We will see many private sector jobs under pressure as well – as stated before, all to protect the wealthy at the expense of the poor…
I feel sorry for the many decent Lib dem voters who have been so betrayed by their own party – it’ll certainly be just a two-party race next time.
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I agree peter – also does shropshire and the west midlands greater area public realise that their emergency services are already starting to be privatised with agency staff answering their calls for assistance?
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There are a lot of economies that councils can make – get rid of ‘non-jobs’ and all the rest of it. They should have made a start a long time ago on that. But even that will only put a small dent in £60 million’s worth of cuts.
What with Powys CC also planning similar cuts and 800 job losses (with a somewhat optimistic hope that they can go through voluntary redundancy and natural wastage, the fact remains that these cuts will reverberate far beyond council employees. They will probably deeply damage the Shropshire and Mid Wales economy. The Government’s hope is that by cutting back the public sector, not only will money be saved but that jobs will be created in the private sector, but that is just a hope they’re clinging to at present. Outside of government-supporting economists, it doesn’t look like anyone thinks that will actually happen.
People have been supporting the idea of ‘austerity cuts’ because they always think the cuts will affect *someone else*. When hundreds of people and services are axed in the Shropshire and Mid Wales area, affecting as a knock-on hundreds of related jobs in all kinds of areas, make no mistake – *everyone* except the very rich are going to start squealing.
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i am pleased to see finally the public sector is suffering like the rest of us did in the recession it will be better in the long run with more private companies running services instead so the staff will work harder or get sacked not like now when they have a job for life
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Peter, why do you feel sorry for the people who voted for the Liberal Democrats? They got the best they could hope for.
The LibDems were never going to win power on their own so the best that their voters could hope for was to share power with someone, and that is exactly what they got.
If they have an issue with the LibDems compromising on their beliefs, this is what you get with a coalition, and by changing the voting system, again something that the LiBdems have been pushing for, you end up with a coalition government.
If anyone thinks that you can be part of a coalition without making compromises they really are living in cloud cuckooland.
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Be positive, good people of Shropshire, and think about the hugh cut in Council Tax that will be coming your way after they have applied all these cuts……………
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Sorry spelt huge wrong first time…….oooops.
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end wee kan xpect moor spillin mishtaks iv thees kut baks goon four to ling
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guess what they are spending £60million on building an incinerator which people are totally opposed too, so scrap that and all other services are sorted
i should be an accountant or the cheif executive maybe will they pay me £180,000 to come up with this idea??
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good riddance to the lot of them i say
this council is nothing but rubbish, ever since they took over from SABC its been poorly managed
its now so beurocratic, its straggling the pub trade with all the licencing and inspections and paper work
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easy peasy there is so much waste there
i’d cut the incinerator for starters
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i agree with that!
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The council has wasted £600,000 on that stupid
pile of concrete by the welsh bridge.
That would have paid wages of 24 binmen for a
year. Or the remuneration and exspences of one cheif executive for two years.
Or they could have reduced our council tax.
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Good start lets get on with it, and lets get rid of the Shrewsbury Mayor and all the cost associated with that, make council officials travel on public transport, then we may get better services, turn the very large free car park for the Shirehall staff on London Road into allotments.
Bring back the stocks to the square so the muppets that agreed the Darwin mess at the bottom of Mardol can be shown what we think of them, I would pay a pound ago for rotton tomatoes, after that the even bigger idiots that agreed the planning consent for the subsidized new theatre .
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there is too many managers there for starters and too many soft jobs in pr and education, the LEA has more staff than the schools, more leisure managers than lifeguards, more ‘street scene coordinators’ than litter pickers
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sack the board
the cheif exec earns 180k
just lose the lot
job done
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Ha ha – there will be no more free parking at frankwell for staff then!!! (see older article)
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they wasted £35 million on that awful theatre for starters! why not just privatise it
they also waste thousands every year on britain in bloom – cut that
they also waste loads cutting grass on roadside verges that should be left for wildlife
they waste millions providing rural primary schools when kids could just commute to the towns
they waste millions on these local joint committees doing fake consultations which they never listen to
they waste thousands leaving the lights on at shirehall every night and their pension scheme must go
they should also privatise all the swimming baths in my opinion and sell the golf course and playing fields for development, keeping fit is a personal responsibility not for the big brother state to provide leisure facilities at public expense
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owch
no doubt councillors and managers will make millions whilst low paid workers suffer and more and more gets privatised
its a disgrace
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