UNIONS have threatened strike action after Southampton council chiefs announced a mass staff pay cut and the loss of 250 jobs.

As reported yesterday, all staff have been told their pay must be slashed by an average of 5.4 per cent to save at least 400 more jobs from the axe.

Tory council leaders said the idea came from staff as the authority faces its biggest ever round of budget cuts.

But unions said the cuts were unacceptable to most employees.

Southampton City Council is one of the first councils in the country to propose the universal staff pay cut.

Council finance chiefs reckon they need to make record savings of £62m over the next four years to meet Government funding cuts of 28 per cent. The pay cuts will help to plug £8.6m of an estimated £20m black hole next year. But hundreds more jobs could go in future years.

A consultation was launched yesterday to reduce paid working hours by two hours a week for the vast majority of the council’s non-teaching 4,180 employees, in order to achieve the pay cut.

The council’s 31 chief officers will see their salaries slashed and be told to take five days unpaid leave.

Tory council bosses said they wanted to slash the number of senior managers by around a quarter.

Councillors will have their allowances cut by five per cent.

There will be a two-year pay freeze for all staff and salary increases will be stopped.

Elsewhere mileage rates will be cut from up 54p per mile to 40p and a car lease scheme scrapped to save about half a million pounds. Non-statutory sick pay will be cut back to three days without a doctor’s note.

Draft savings proposals obtained by the Daily Echo reveal youth workers, personal advisors and family workers will be the hardest hit with more than 50 posts on the line in their department.

Itchen Bridge toll collectors will be scrapped and eight posts in parking services have been targeted for the chop.

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The council said it would be ring-fencing children’s social care from cuts and investing more in repairing the city’s crumbling road network.

The announcement comes just a week after figures published under Government transparency rules revealed the bill for consultant fees at Southampton City Council was over £1.3m in the past six months.

Unison, the union, said they were “shocked” by the proposals which left all staff in fear of their jobs. They vowed to wage a campaign against them.

An urgent meeting for union members has been called for November 24 where industrial action will be considered.

Steve Brazier, regional manager the Hampshire branch of Unison, said the council was attacking low-paid and vulnerable workers, particularly women, in a “slash and burn” of services.

He accused the Tory administration of slavishly following the coalition government’s cuts programme.

“These sorts of cuts will affect all the services the council provides. It’s a tax on every single side. It’s not acceptable and not something we will be prepared to live with. It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said.

The job cuts are deeper than the council had initially forecast, and could be worse when the Government reveals the council’s funding settlement in December. The final budget will be set in February.

The council has already saved over £24m in the past three years, with the loss of more then 300 jobs. Its annual spending budget, excluding schools, is around £180m.

Council leader Royston Smith, who yesterday began a series of face-to-face meetings to sell the cuts to staff, said they were needed to protect jobs and frontline services.

He said he hoped once staff had had time to digest the proposals they would realise it was the fairest way to make the savings needed.

He said: “In common with councils across the country, we simply can’t do everything we have done in the past.

Some services will be reduced and some will go all together.

“Our focus will be on protecting services that support the economic development of Southampton, creating new jobs for local people.”

All council staff have already been asked to take voluntary redundancy or early retirement to help to cut the council wage bill, which totalled some £113m last year.

Dozens of volunteers have come forward already.

Cllr Smith added: “I recognise that our savings proposals will have a direct impact on council staff. Up to 250 posts will go in the first year.

Redundancy is awful for those staff involved and I'm very sorry for this.”

Liberal Democrat group leader Councillor Adrian Vinson said: “No one should be under any illusion that we face a horrendous council budget. Local government cannot escape its share in meeting the debt crisis the country was left with by the last Labour government.

“However it seems a blatant contradiction for an administration which puts creating jobs in the city at the top of its priorities to be slashing so many jobs from the council payroll.”

A spokesman for the Southampton Labour group said: “Before these job cuts it seemed like the Tories were running this city on the principle of ‘everything must go', but now they’ve expanded it to 'everyone must go’.”

“With these job cuts the city council is acting like a football club sinking into administration by holding a fire sale of its personnel, and we know where that usually leads.

“The most worrying thing is that the worst is still probably yet to come. These redundancies will be a bitter pill for loyal staff to swallow and are bound to have an impact on services to residents.”