Hampshire County Council faced with making £25m in cuts from children’s services budget (From Daily Echo)

Hampshire County Council faced with making £25m in cuts from children’s services budget

12:10pm Wednesday 28th July 2010 in

By Rachel Masker »

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MORE than 180 jobs are to be axed in children’s services at Hampshire County Council as bosses strive to save £25m.

The council said the job losses were driven by cuts in Government funding to reduce the national deficit.

The axe has already been wielded on £6.2m of funding and the council anticipates the loss of a further £15.9m in grants after April 2011.

Meanwhile the council is faced with rising bills from the increased number of children taken into care in the wake of the Baby P scandal and home to school transport.

Managers are now planning to chop £24.8m from the £170m children’s services budget in 2011-12. Schools are funded separately.

A consultation with unions over the 185 posts to be shed, equal to six per cent of the departmental workforce, has begun.

Staff will be offered voluntary redundancy and early retirement in an attempt to keep compulsory redundancies down, Children’s services is the first county department to announce cuts as a result of the squeeze on public spending.

Managers say cuts to services have been “minimised” and no social workers involved in frontline child protection work will lose their jobs.

Some 46 senior management posts will be shed as the council streamlines services with fewer area and district teams.

Other job losses Other job losses include 25 youth support workers involved in careers information and counselling work in schools and colleges, four social work posts in special educational needs and four departmental communications officers.

Some nine jobs are also to be lost as the number of performance targets the council has to meet is to be cut. The council has had to employ staff to serve the demands from Government for data.

The voluntary sector will also be a casualty as there will be a £1.4m cut in funding with no more grants awarded during the current financial year.

Other cuts include £200,000 from county music education service. This means the service will have to charge more for the hire of instruments and some bands stopped.

Councillor David Kirk, executive member for children’s services, approved the cuts behind closed doors last Monday.

He said: “We face unprecedented financial challenges as a result of spending cuts and are having to make extremely difficult choices.

“Along with the requirement to make significant savings we must balance the need to ensure we continue to deliver high quality services, to keep children and young people in Hampshire safe and to maintain a vibrant educational system.”

The council has warned further job losses are likely after the Government’s autumn spending review.

Peter Terry, regional organiser for Unison, said: “We don’t believe you can make cuts as deep as these without affecting services.”

Mr Terry said he did not believe the job cuts could be justified and the union will be consulting its members of what action to take.

Comments(27)

hulla baloo says...
12:18pm Wed 28 Jul 10

Great. Reduce funding for most vulnerable and those that need the support.
How about cutting the funding/budgets for the drug abusers/immigrants/u
seless leaflets/work shy etc first.