Birmingham City Council ponders 600 job cuts

Struggling Birmingham City Council is considering up to 600 job cuts as it attempts to make a dent in its colossal debt.

The local authority – Europe’s largest – declared itself effectively bankrupt in September after revealing it does not have the funds to settle more than £760 million in equal pay claims. It served a section 114 notice to the government indicating that it did not have the resources to balance its books.

A Birmingham City Council spokesperson said: “We anticipate that (subject to consultation) up to 600 posts may be declared redundant across the council. This number does not include posts that have been deleted through organisational re-design that were already vacant, nor does it include vacancies.

“’We understand that this news will be unsettling, and I want to reassure you that we are here to support you through this process. We will now start formal consultation with our corporate trade union representatives and follow these with directorate collective consultation meetings.”

The council said it would start consulting unions and staff immediately, but Stuart Richards, senior organiser at the GMB expressed disappointment that the news had broken before union talks.

“We’ve not yet received the full information of what those proposals are or what the total number of redundancies are,” he told the BBC.

“Again, seeing this in the public domain before they start talking to the trade unions is incredibly disappointing.”

In October Birmingham City Council reached a crucial agreement with unions over how jobs are graded, moving a step closer to settling its equal pay claims, but last month thousands of council workers began voting in a strike ballot today after council bosses announced further delays to ending its equal pay crisis.

Birmingham is the seventh council in the past four years to issue a 114 notice. It has been criticised for spending £184m on the 2022 Commonwealth Games, and £100m on fixing a new IT system.

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