Questions from Councillors
The deadline for questions to be submitted to the Monitoring Officer is Monday 15 April 2024.
Minutes:
Question by Councillor Patrick Canavan
In relation to the voluntary redundancy exercise please outline:
a) the total number of staff who applied
b) the number of those staff whose applications have been accepted
c) the number of applications refused or are still under consideration
Also, can it be confirmed that following this exercise no staff will be made compulsorily redundant?
Response by the Portfolio Holder for Transformation, Councillor Jeff Hanna
May I firstly thank all of our staff for the work they do on behalf of our residents. It is a matter of regret that the need to achieve some fifty million of savings means that we need to reduce our number of staff, with all of the uncertainties and concerns involved.
I am grateful to the Human Resources team for their ongoing work in managing the process and I was pleased that the invitation was made to staff to offer themselves for Voluntary Redundancy, as a slightly less painful way of managing the staffing reductions.
It was explained that applications would be evaluated taking into consideration the posts and skills that needed to be retained and this has included considering:
- the impact of the loss of the post on our ability to meet our statutory duties and targets,
- our current and future service needs
- the ability for work to be re-allocated if the post were lost, or for the service delivery to be re-designed, and lastly,
- the affordability of the individual redundancy arrangements.
Given this, we anticipated rather more staff wanting to explore the possibility of voluntary redundancy, than would meet these considerations, and this has proven to be the case.
Indeed, in some cases, where several staff in similar posts applied, a scoring process needed to be used to decide which might proceed.
In other cases, future levels of staffing remain uncertain, as is the case in libraries, as the library review is still under way, and applications there have been paused, and will be considered under a different process.
Further some members of staff have withdrawn their application during the process.
Accordingly, the answers to Councillor Canavan’s question are slightly more detailed that he may have expected. As of today’s date;
330 staff have applied for Voluntary Redundancy, of whom 13 have subsequently withdrawn their application.
The Corporate Management Board have approved 79 applications, 64 having then been agreed by the employee and are proceeding, 4 are awaiting employee agreement, and 11 have subsequently been withdrawn by the employee.
A total of 206 applications have been declined, with 2 not yet having been submitted to the Board, none are under current consideration, and 30 have been paused and will be considered under a separate process.
It was never expected that there would be a perfect fit between those applying and the areas where we would need to reduce our staffing, so I am afraid that it will still be necessary for a compulsory redundancy process to be used to complete the overall reductions, ... view the full minutes text for item 102