Tag Archives: Savings

CUTS NEWS

Rees Ted Talk — Look! Man in a shirt from Top Man doing a Ted talk.

Not much information emerging from the Rev Rees on the scale of cuts in public services he’s proposing over the next year*. Instead the inane egoist seems to be focussing his PR efforts on boasting about how many ‘hits’ his ridiculous Canadian TED Talk is getting on Youtube and his fantasy plan for an underground network in Bristol.

What we do know is that of the £11.7m of savings planned for delivery in 2021/22, only 46% were achieved.Leaving around £5.5m to be brought forward to this year. We also know around £29m of ‘efficiencies’ and ‘transformations’ were announced in this year’s budget. That’s a total of about £34.5m cuts to be made to public services this year then.

But what will be cut? Council documents, carefully hidden from view, have identified “six key areas for service reviews”. They are: property and capital; be more business-like and secure more external resource; improving efficiencies; digital transformation; reducing the need for direct services and, er, redesigning, reducing, or stopping services.

Property appears on these cuts lists every year and delivers nothing; the council being “more businesslike” is a hollow joke and that last time they tried digital transformation it delivered a £30m deficit senior bosses tried to hide from the mayor and public.

It’s therefore likely all the cuts will come from “improving efficiencies”, euphemism for staff cuts; reducing the need for direct services, which means trying to stop the public accessing services they’re entitled to (see SEND) and redesigning, reducing, or stopping services, which means scrapping services altogether.

So the Reverend’s plan is to fire staff, bully council taxpayers into not taking up services and cut anything else that’s not nailed down to save £34.5m

No wonder he wants you to look the other way at his stupid TED Talk.

*Since this article was published Bristol City Council has published a press release acknowledging they may need to make £31.1m next year. What they didn’t mention was an annex to a finance report to cabinet that suggested these cuts might be as much as £87.6m!

BOSSES WAGES UP: ‘SAVINGS’ DOWN

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When Labour councillors voted in November for a TEN PER CENT pay rise for the council’s senior bosses as part of an organisational restructure, they assured us that £750k would be saved by employing less bosses.

Alas, just a month later and with an internal consultation on these management changes underway for the next few months, news is SNEAKED OUT that savings will now only be £500k. And, of course, there’s no guarantee this figure won’t drop further before the restructure is complete.

Looks like it’s another con to increase wages at the top in exchange for fuck all.

UPDATE:
Oddly, an entirely different story emerged directly from the mouth of the Reverend Rees regarding these ‘savings’ (as opposed to the traditional term ‘cuts’).

When questioned this week about how much his new senior management structure would ‘save’ us, the Reverend claimed the figure had risen to £830K. Somewhat different to the £500k savings figure stated in his own finance report he signed off in December.

Relevant sections of the reports are here:

Meanwhile a presentation to the HR committee just today still claims the savings are £750k:

So where did this magical new pr-friendly £830k savings figure the mayor’s spouting come from? And why are the HR committee still being fed an old figure discredited in finance reports in December?

And what – to use the Reverend’s own farcical management-speak bollocks – is the “single version of the truth”?

MORE COUNCIL CUTS COMING?

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Sneaked in to the last Cabinet Meeting before the mayoral election was a paper harmlessly entitled ‘Change Board 6 Monthly Monitoring Report’, which just happened to drop in the fact that the council needs to make another £12.9m of CUTS by next April.

The paper meanders over twelve pages, explaining that £33m ‘savings’ have been made and another £18m are in the pipeline before dropping in that “the majority of THE REMAINING £12.9M SAVINGS ARE YET TO BE FORMALLY IDENTIFIED”! It then drifts on to explain that further cuts of £75.3m will be required 2017 – 2020.

But how exactly are these ‘savings’ of £12.9m over the next year going to be made? The main report itself forgets to say. However, on the very last page of the report under the final heading ‘HUMAN RESOURCES IMPLICATIONS’, it says:

“The progress set out in this paper is in line with the Section 188 notice issued in November 2013 … At that time it was estimated that there would be a potential reduction of 971 employees during the three financial years covered bythe MTFS … The organisation restructure that took place during the 2014/15 financial year resulted in workforce reductions of 523 FTE.

“Where further workforce reductions are required we will seek to reach agreement with the recognised Trade Unions on how to mitigate the need to make any further compulsory redundancies.”

No doubt, ENTIRELY COINCIDENTALLY, if you multiply the remaining redundancies available under this three year old notice (448) by an average wage cost at the council (£30,000) you come up with a figure not unadjacent to £12.9m!

With the mayoral election now really taking off, it will be interesting to see how many of the candidates will be committing to these LUDICROUS REDUNDANCIES and how many won’t. It’ll also be interesting to find out how any candidate rejecting these redundancies intends to make these cuts.

Staff at the council, meanwhile, are FLABBERGASTED that their bosses are proposing more redundancies. “The whole place is already overworked, understaffed and in meltdown, “ a worker told The BRISTOLIAN.

“If you want evidence just try phoning us up or accessing any service. It’s an ABSOLUTE FARCE, the public are simply ignored these days as a distraction.

“There’s no staff left to do anything already. Workloads are huge and unmanageable. More staffing cuts are impossible to make. Any incoming mayor who tries more cuts risks CRITICAL DAMAGE to already overstretched services.”

Over to you then mayoral candidates …