COUNCIL LEADER Peter Callow is said to be ‘heartbroken’ as 200 men and women of the town hall clear their desks and prepare for redundancy following the unfortunate announcement that Blackpool Council are to cull almost 5% of their total staff.
The cuts form part of a package of measures intended to save £3m per year and follow an announcement on Monday that the Government were to cut council funding.
Today’s announcement comes as a hammer blow to job seekers following B&M Bargains’ recent announcement that it was to axe up to 700 jobs at its South Shore based distribution centre.
Opposition leader Simon Blackburn, who spoke last week on this site about the current Conservative council’s big-spending capital projects at the expense of local services and maintenance, accused them of panicking and said the jobs purge was ‘misguided’.
Jobs within education will be protected, but staff in other departments will face a grim few weeks as the council thrashes out a deal with the relevant unions.
Unemployment in Blackpool has always been fairly bad, with many jobs being seasonal, a transient population and a distinct lack of professional jobs. It rose by a stratospheric 32% between 2008 and 2009, and by April 2010 there were 4,795 people recorded as claiming Job Seekers’ Allowance. This is 5.7% of the working age population in the town: the national average is 4.1%.
Despite a recovery in the Lancashire 14-authority sub-region that saw unemployment drop by 13% in the last year, Blackpool bucked the trend and was the only authority that saw an increase.
Hopefully these public sector job cuts have not set a trend for the year to come.
This is just the beginning,I hear that one in five jobs are to go in the Civil Service,to be announced next week.If Fallow is so worried about jobs, then reduce the wages of his 5 directors who earn 100k plus;that would help.His words are hollow, like him,hollow.
Whilst cuts are necessary, I fear we are going back to the 1980s and Blackpool is gonna cop for this:BIG TIME.
Double dip, here we come.
June 22nd is not gonna be a nice day.
I agree Horold, I would like to see some wage cuts at the top and look at the wages of the people running the Housing Association. Housing Associations have an interesting reputation for paying their top people some seriously high salaries.
Well said Harold and Zim Flyer, cuts are very necessary but it does annoy me how the people in the ivory tower like Weaver never have to suffer. He earns £140k a year for doing what? He could easily afford to take a 75% paycut and he would still outearn most council staff. I agree the people at the top should be first for cuts.
This is what angers me,these organisations are top heavy in volume of directors/managers etc and pay rates,cut their salaries and remove them,that will save jobs and cash.
Cut 50k off that useless, lazy,incompetent, Steve Weaver, that would save 3 jobs and he would still get 100k!
Callow’s words are as insincere as himself.
Just an update, Steve Weaver does not earn £140k. He earns £149k following his 7% pay rise last year!
I agree with the sentiment that those at the top do seem to earn obscene amounts compared to the footsoldiers in the town hall, and recent revelations about this on a national level (civil servants out-earning the Prime Minister being one example) suggest that Blackpool Borough Council is not the only one with highly paid executives that appear to do very little, but in all cases there’s only so many of these people you can cut.
Cutting Weaver’s salary would save a few jobs, but then who do you cut next? Even if you cut £50k from each of the town hall executives it only saves a handful of jobs. Granted, if you cut their pensions as well you could save about 20 jobs in total but that leaves another 180 to go.
Furthermore, if the council operates fine following these job cuts, does that not therefore mean that they were non-jobs anyway, created by Labour to offset the decline suffered by other sectors such as manufacturing?
Good point about pensions, I had forgotten about that ticking time bomb.
There are some really good hard working public sector workeres, at the same time one only has to go through the Guardian recruitment pages to see there are a lot of jobs we can do without.
As a public sector worker, I have no objection to being asked to pay more towards my pension, I believe its the right thing to do.Its unfair to burden everyone else with my pension.What I want to see is the banks being made to pay more towards reducing the deficit, its was they who created this mess (aided by Nulabour), they should pay more.Are there any plans to do just that I ask? If not, then there should be public outrage at such a failure to make the banks pay.
In addition,I agree with Zims comments about the Guardian and non jobs, (Diversity being one!)I am happy to say that I have a proper job ,as does TB. I welcome the reduction in waste within the public sector, but it must be done as not to create massive unemployment and then inturn impair economic growth.Thats I a fear I hold; dont want to the the 1980s again!!
In additon, a complete review of the top/upper quartile of all public sector workers should take place, noone but noone should get more than the PM.
Slash the wages of Weaver,Garrett,France etc;they do not deserve this huge salaries.
There are other things regarding weaver et al, that could be cut/slashed, lol, lol, lol.