The Trade Unions met this morning with the Chief Executive, Paul Jukes, and Assistant Chief Executives to receive the phase 2 restructure report and an update on the budget settlement.
The council have a 3.8% reduction in their budget from the Scottish Government this year. This equates to a £34.661 million budget gap. They plan to offset this via base budget adjustments and other measures by £11.97 million. This means that £22.69 million needs to be cut.
The phase 2 restructure will achieve £6 million of cuts, leaving a balance of £16.69 million still to find. We won’t know where they are planning to cut this from until they share their budget proposals in the 1st week of January 2017.
Paul Jukes assured the unions that there would be no compulsory redundancies and that staff reductions would be via deleting vacancies, re-deployment and voluntary redundancy.
There are major structural changes in some areas of the council, as had been trailed by the phase one re-structure. This paper obviously has implications for our members, but we must keep in mind that it is only half the story and that we will only see the whole picture once the budget proposals are shared.
The attached paper outlines the headline budget position and the new council structure
Marie Quigley
Branch Secretary