EXCLUSIVE

by Ruth Banks

rbanks@thekmgroup.co.uk

Nearly £4million in taxpayers' money has been shelled out making council staff redundant in Kent, we reveal today.

Kent's local authorities made 330 people redundant between April 2009 and July 2010.

Only 69 members of staff left voluntarily.

The largest cuts were made by Kent County Council – which paid out a staggering £1.2m to 124 staff.

Medway Council also spent almost £700,000 on payouts to 82 staff.

Unison's Kent organiser Zoe Van Dyke warned the figures were the thin end of the wedge for council workers.

She said: "This is just the start because we are looking at much higher figures than that – 75,000 jobs over the South East by 2015 or 2016.

"It’s just the beginning of a nightmare for workers in the public sector."

Kent County Council Councillor Roger Gough said most of the redundancies in his authority were made as a result of reorganisations in the adult social services department, and the team dealing with children, families and education.

"We pay about six months’ salary in redundancy payments, so within the year you are, in effect, making a saving," he said.

Cllr Gough said the council tried to avoid redundancies, by redeploying staff to posts vacated naturally through staff turnover.

But he did admit that the looming budget cuts were likely to mean more job losses in the future.

He added: "If we have a 25 per cent cut in our budget, you would look at 1,000 or so posts going.

"As I say 1,000 posts going is not the same as saying that there would be 1,000 redundancies.

"But given the financial pressures we are under, we will inevitably be a smaller organisation in the coming years."

There were large discrepancies between the redundancy payouts made by the county’s district councils.

Canterbury City Council made 36 people redundant – three times as many as any other district council – costing it almost half a million pounds in redundancy payments.

Canterbury City Council chief executive Colin Carmichael said a number of his senior staff were made redundant, which pushed up pay-outs.

He said: "A couple of years ago we used to have 20 senior staff. We now have 13.

"Those changes have saved the council over half a million pounds a year so these are value for money changes.

"We are taking all sorts of different steps to reduce the cost of these redundancies to the public purse.

"Over the last year we negotiated a reduction in the entitlement to redundancy pay with our local trade unions, and we’re actually in negotiations to reduce it again.

"If we lose about 25 per cent of our budget over the next three or four years, we want to avoid having to make more staff redundant in order to pay for higher redundancy payments.

"It’s not great - and of course staff are worried about it - but our task is to preserve jobs and a lower redundancy payment allows us to save more jobs."

By contrast, Dartford Borough Council and Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council both laid off only three staff members over the same period.

But Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council incurred costs of £222,232, way in excess of the £36,844 paid out by Dartford.

Tonbridge and Malling's chief executive David Hughes revealed the costs per person were actually lower than it seemed.

He said this was because a fourth member of staff had been laid off shortly before April 2009 and their pay-out had been processed in the following financial year.

The council also incurred high "capitalised pension" costs.

He added: "Where you’ve got people who are above the age of 55, then they have an entitlement under the local government pension scheme to opt to draw their pension at that stage.

"Because they are retiring ahead of what would be their normal retirement age, we have to compensate the pension fund.

"And that actually is a big chunk of the costs that are involved.

"As a result of those redundancies, we will be saving just under £170,000 a year.

"So it’s going to take about 1.3 years for us to recover those costs, but thereafter we’re making thousands of pounds a year in savings."

"These were not redundancies connected with the looming austerity regime. These were actually redundancies as a result of changes to the design of services."

The lowest amount spent by any council was £25,613 on redundancy payments for four members of staff at Gravesham Borough Council. All of them left voluntarily.