Recent news that Sandwell Council has paid out just short of £18 million in redundancy payments shedding 1081 staff in the last 5 years tells a significant story.
Of course, when this news got out it sent Labour Cllr Steve Eling, Sandwell’s head of finance into his usual spinning socialist party speak. According to him the government were 100% to blame and were throwing “people on the scrapheap”. The reality is that a substantial proportion of the employees leaving were more than happy to bid farewell to Sandwell MBC.
Sandwell Council as an employer suffers the reputation of being far from caring. Generally, ordinary employees there complain of an atmosphere of bullying constraint. Indeed one current serving Labour councillor, during her time as an employee of Sandwell MBC suffered such bullying and sexual harassment in her job at Sandwell that a court ordered her compensation of c. £100.000. Perhaps this is why a substantial number of the 1081 staff who left took voluntary redundancy. What is less clear is why a favoured 33 were made redundant by the Council and then re-employed by it.
Against the steadily declining unemployment rate in Sandwell and the fact that more people in the whole country are in employment than ever, talk of people on “the scrapheap” is codswallop. Further it ignores the fact that a large number, those who opted for voluntary redundancy, faced with a choice of working for the Council or Cllr. Eling’s “scrapheap” chose the “scrapheap” or perhaps what they saw as well deserved retirement.
Cllr. Eling is then quoted as saying “It’s …madness we pay out public money to kick people out on the dole and then you have to pay out the dole money as well” Now kicking people out is not very nice but it is also inappropriate as a term to describe the process by which an employee welcomes and seeks redundancy to accelerate retirement or to get to a better employment billet. Surely, even Cllr Eling is not so divorced from the concerns of working people that he would deny the redundant the payments the law provides for them and job-seekers benefits while they seek employment.
Then Cllr Eling had an unusual lapse into reality stating “I accept there had to be economies”.
Why had there to be economies? Answer; because the last Labour government spent recklessly and unnecessarily. Hardly a month passed without the announcement of some new spending initiative designed to impress. It was Flash Tony then Flash Gordon splashing the cash. The problem was it was substantially borrowed money which now has to be repaid. That is the reason why it was necessary for the coalition government and for this government to trim local authority spending. A responsible Labour government would have done the same and didn’t the Labour party, belatedly and unconvincingly, promise this in an effort to win the May ’15 General Election?
Sandwell Council historically was run in the same way that Blair and Brown ran the country, with the same socialist disregard when it came to spending. After all the council tax-payer was a milch cow which could be relied on to produce more cash for the spending machine. Presiding over that fecklessness in Sandwell was the same Cllr Steve Eling who deplores yet defends these redundancies.
The redundancy of 1081 employees is evidence of gross over-manning at Sandwell Council. Nor has the loss of those employees materially affected performance. The Council has lost a substantial proportion of its workforce yet still manages to function at the same level of effectiveness even if that level is not high.
There are no figures for those who lost their jobs involuntarily and who have found difficulty in obtaining re-employment. They are likely to be a small proportion of the total. But they are victims of a system that created a bloated over staffed workforce regardless of cost or need. An alternative more beneficial to workers and their families is the creation of real jobs providing job security. Falls in unemployment totals and the record number now employed is strong evidence of sound economic policies achieving this aim.