More job losses made at BCP Council

BCP Council is looking to shed staff numbers this year as it continues to balance its books and make about £50m worth of savings. 

Transformation cabinet member at the authority Jeff Hanna said that as of April 23, 64 of the total 330 who applied for voluntary redundancy have been agreed to by the council.

Read more: BCP Council to make job cuts to its 5,000-strong workforce

However, 206 of those applications were declined as the job losses would have meant BCP Council couldn’t fulfil its statutory duties and targets.

Others are either waiting to reach an agreement, withdrawn by the council, declined by the council or the application has been paused to considered under a separate process.

Responding to questions from BCP Labour leader Patrick Canavan at a full council meeting, Cllr Hanna said the voluntary redundancy scheme is a “slightly less painful way of managing staff levels”. 

He said: “It was never expected there would be a perfect fit between those applying and the areas where we would need to reduce our staffing.

Transformation cabinet member Jeff Hanna (Image: BCP Council)

“I’m afraid it will still be necessary for a compulsory redundancy process to be used to complete the overall reductions.  

“But I’m pleased this has been minimised though the use of the voluntary redundancy scheme.” 

He added: “We anticipated rather more staff wanting to explore the possibility of voluntary redundancies and this has been the case. 

“In some cases where several staff in similar posts applied, a scorning process needed to be used to decide which might proceed. 

“In other cases, future levels of staff remain uncertain, as in the case in libraries as the review is still under way. Applications there have been paused and will be considered under a different process.” 

Finance cabinet member Mike Cox told the Echo back in January he expected 120 people to be victim of compulsory redundancy – the voluntary scheme will only add to that. 

Mike Cox, cabinet member for finance (Image: BCP Council)

Council leadership have also been trying to move people around departments where appropriate to minimise job losses. 

Council chief executive Graham Farrant added: “Some of those [redundancies] might be held by agency staff, some of them might be vacant, some of them will be permanent people.  

“[If they are] permanent people, what we do is try and redeploy them into other vacancies if we can and try and reduce our reliance on agency." 

BCP Council spent more than £630,000 making 21 people redundant in the year to March 2023, data from the Department for Levelling Up showed.   

The previous year saw 48 jobs axed at a cost of £2,203,000 and £2,948,000 the year before that.