'100 town hall jobs go' to pay for Council Tax freeze
 | | Andrew Cornwell |
MORE than 100 council jobs could be axed before next May's local elections to pay for a Council Tax freeze.
Islington Council's Liberal Democrat chiefs are preparing the 2010-11 budget based on a zero per cent increase in Council Tax.
 | | John Gilbert |
But that means that about 100 town hall posts will have to go, according to briefing papers that have been circulated to all councillors.
The cuts will include not replacing the assistant chief executive and two department directors who are all leaving. This will save almost £300,000 a year. But even then, the books will still not balance - to the tune of £3.9million. That means that even more posts may have to be cut.
Lib-Dem backbencher Councillor Andrew Cornwell, who stepped down as finance chief last year, claimed that services would also be affected.
He said: "The parties' attempts to offer a pre-election bribe to Islington voters will come at some cost. Initial calculations suggest at least 100 posts will be lost, with redundancies not being ruled out if affected staff cannot be redeployed into vacant posts. While many posts proposed for removal are administrative or 'back office' jobs, frontline services will also be affected.
"Social work, youth support, pest control, street trading, children's transport and care services will all be hit with cuts. Library book budgets will be reduced. Long waits currently experienced when phoning the council are set to continue with a £218,000 cut to the funding for the Contact Islington call centre.
"Housing repair and maintenance budgets will also fall by £720,000, or about four per cent, which will not please tenants already unhappy about long waits for repairs."
Councillor John Gilbert, the new finance chief, insisted that it would be mainly already-vacant posts that would go. He said: "We are not talking about massive redundancies."
The news comes as Islington Council is also battling a funding gap this financial year. The council is predicting a £1.7million shortfall in its general spending fund by the end of the financial year. The biggest problem is that motorists are racking up fewer fines and not buying as many parking permits. At the moment, it looks like the council will get £1.5million less from drivers than expected.
Councillor Cornwell said: "The over-spends are in every department now and they are getting worse. I am worried that the budget is slipping out of control."
But Councillor Gilbert insisted that the total shortfall would be no more than £750,000 on a £240million budget. He said: "We have £16million of reserves so we would just dip into that.
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