Cornwall Council to cut jobs to save £18m in wage bills

Cornwall Council is set to cut jobs after revealing it needs to reduce its wage bill by £18m.

An email from leader Linda Taylor has told councillors the cuts were needed by the end of March 2022.

It said they would be achieved by continuing a recruitment freeze, closing vacant roles and inviting staff to take voluntary redundancy.

It also said compulsory redundancies "will be unavoidable" but measures would be taken to minimise them.

The note did not provide details for the number of jobs which could be cut, saying it could not "translate the... budget reduction figure into a defined number of roles", the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) said.

But it explained the £18m needed to be saved from a current staff spend of about £200m.

Mrs Taylor, the Conservative leader of the unitary authority, had previously warned that "tough decisions" were ahead, with the council facing its toughest budget setting yet; while deputy leader David Harris, responsible for finance, previously said "there's no money".

The email to councillors said the planned £18m cut was "our best current estimate of the financial reduction we will need to make from our workforce to meet our budget gap".

It added that it "may change as work progresses to set out MTFP [medium term financial plan] over the coming months".

Speaking to the BBC, Mrs Taylor said: "Nobody wants to hear this, but I'm hoping that what has been put forward to support the staff, and help them with their decision-making, will be of some comfort to them."

With a workforce of about 5,000 people the council is "the biggest employer in Cornwall", the authority's website said.

Last month, the county authority approved a new £63m capital programme "to address major economic challenges faced by Cornwall Council".

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