West Berkshire Council Wastes Millions on Redundancies
June 17, 2011 2:42 PM
West
Berkshire Council wasted millions of pounds last year making many of its staff redundant, when they had plenty of money to keep those staff members providing services to the public.
The final accounts for 2010/11 were released to the Executive last night. They showed that the Council cut its spending so hard and so fast during the year that they ended up spending £1.27M less than their revised budget. But the cuts cost the taxpayers over £2.5M mainly in redundancy payments.
David Rendel, the Liberal Democrat Finance Spokesperson commented, "If the Council had spent what it planned to spend, we could have kept the day centres and youth clubs open, maintained the roads properly, and provided our failing schools with more expert support. That would have saved a lot of redundancy payments, which in turn would have released more money to keep more services going and more staff in place.
"The Conservative claim that the huge underspend was good for the taxpayer goes to show just how little they care about providing top class council services, and how callous they are when it comes to throwing staff onto the dole queue. But it also shows how little they understand value for money, when you realise that they have paid out millions of pounds for all the unnecessary extra redundancies they created.
"When I made these points in the executive meeting, the Conservative leader of the Council described them as "drivel". But when I asked him if he thought that was how the staff who had been made redundant would describe them, he fell silent. He had no answer to that."
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