Job cuts latest: 800 Hackney Council posts face the axe

Job cuts at Hackney Council are looming large. Photo: Hackney Citizen

Eight hundred Hackney Council jobs are officially ‘at risk’, new figures from the GMB union reveal.

The council has pledged to preserve ‘front-line services’ for residents, but this could mean that ‘back-of-house’ posts are more likely to face the chop, following the recently-announced government cuts to local authority spending.

Explaining its estimated figure of 800 job losses, a spokeperson for the GMB union said, “Rolling forward the budget cuts over the next four years, from May 2010 to April 2014 (till the end of the cuts), we estimate that this will be the number of Hackney Council posts lost. This will be achieved by vacancies left unfilled when staff leave, staff taking early retirement and also those taking voluntary redundancy.”

A Hackney Council spokesperson said that whilst there were likely to be over 100 job losses, “Eight hundred is not part of our planning, and not a figure we recognise.” He said the council has put in place a voluntary redundancy process, which may see up to 300 employees leave to take early retirement or pursue other career options.

Asked by the Citizen for the precise number of posts “at risk” that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has been notified of in the last four months, the council has not yet been not forthcoming but said it was in the region of 300.

Paul Kenny, GMB General Secretary, said: “The government is deliberately creating unemployment on a scale that we have not seen before. As a direct consequence of the government spending plans the cumulative number of job losses is 140,456 for 203 authorities in Britain. To that total has to be added the job losses in the rest of the public sector.”

Note: this article was updated at 4.45pm Tuesday 25 January 2011.