ONE in ten workers at troubled Aberdeen City Council might lose their jobs as part of efforts to solve the financial crisis in which the authority is mired, it was claimed yesterday.
A leaked report by external experts, brought in to aid the council, has warned authority leaders that significant redundancies in the 11,500-strong workforce may prove "unavoidable" if the council is to balance its books.
A union leader last ni
ght claimed that up to 1,500 full- and part-time jobs might be under threat as the council struggles to achieve £27 million in savings.
Tommy Campbell, the regional organiser of the Transport and General Workers' Union, said the council had failed to issue a statutory notice of potential redundancies to the unions and the Department of Trade and Industry.
"With £27 million worth of cuts looming and, given that most of that will be down to staffing costs, you are talking about at least 1,000 full-time jobs being lost," he said. "There is no way they are going to get 1,000 volunteers. At worst – by the time we take part-time staff into consideration – we could be talking about 1,500 jobs."
The fears were triggered after details of a report by a group of prominent figures in Scottish local government, brought in to help the cash-strapped council, were made public.
A briefing document, by the council's central management team, states: "On first scrutiny of ACC's budgetary position, (the expert group] advice was that to deliver an ongoing stable budgetary position, we are unlikely to succeed without significant reduction in headcount.
"This is consistent with the messages given by the political administration in the past, that there needs to be a smaller but better rewarded workforce."
It said a key message from the group was that the headcount needed to drop and this had to be raised with unions and staff, adding:
"Compulsory redundancies may be unavoidable."
But Kevin Stewart, the deputy leader of the city council, said no figure had been put on the number of jobs to be cut.
The full article contains 360 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
