More than 130 jobs could be lost at Central Bedfordshire Council in a bid to balance next year’s budget and reshape the local authority – although around a third are currently vacant, a meeting was warned.
As a large employer, Central Bedfordshire Council (CBC) has more than 3,000 staff. Reducing this figure would cut costs by £13.3m, according to a joint budget scrutiny task force report.
The 2025/26 budget is balanced based on the inclusion of £32.2m of efficiencies and £40.5m of pressures, said the scrutiny meeting report.
“We’re planning to significantly reshape the organisation. This will mean reducing the number of staff we employ across the council. It could lead to us being slower to respond to queries, while waiting times might be longer.”
Reserves are being used by CBC to help balance the budget for the current financial year 2024/25, but this will stop next year, the meeting was told.
CBC chief executive Marcel Coiffait explained: “We’ve a legal duty to set a balanced budget and can only spend on service provision that matches our income levels.
“We started this process with a huge gap between those things. We’ve identified some specific savings. We’ve been holding (staff) vacancies.
“We can manage without ever filling some of them, so they’re vacant currently with service delivery unaffected. The value of these is about £1.4m.
“It’s posts from across the council within every directorate and the total is about 30. That doesn’t bridge the gap. As a senior management team, we then look at where we can do the same as we’re doing now with fewer staff.
“That might be through a different way of working or stopping some things we do currently,” he said.
“I’ve a statutory and contractual duty to consult with the staff and the unions.
“The consultation begins this week with the unions and with the staff in early January. I can’t give you the detail now. That first tranche of work on delivering services with fewer staff would save us another £4.4m.
“This deletes a further 92 posts, some of which are vacant but the majority have people in post. There’s still a £7m gap. We then consolidate teams delivering mainly support functions in a disparate way across the council, such as project management.
“We’ve cross-cutting themes around using digitalisation to reduce the number of roles needed to do work which can be done electronically, whether that’s consolidating our call centres, or streamlining the back offices and processes, and we’ll continue to do that.
“We’ve brought in a new director of resources and organisation change, Robert Ling, who has been essentially consolidating the eight councils of North Yorkshire to save tens of millions of pounds, so that expertise helps us do this at pace.
“I’m constantly assessing the impact of the changes, but those might deliver opportunities for further reductions in staffing. That takes some time,” he added.
“The final thing is examining and reducing our third party spend with suppliers, without impacting on the service we provide to the public. We can upskill out staff to do certain tasks without using external contractors, such as within IT.
“The government settlement may be more generous, in which case the scale of that £7m outstanding might be slightly less, but it could easily rise. It’s just a plan. Things will change.”
By Euan Duncan
Local Democracy Reporter
