Manchester council has announced that it could lose 2,000 staff as it aims to make savings of £110m over the next year.
The council will propose a voluntary redundancy package for members of staff to deal with the spending cuts imposed by central government. The move could mean the council losing 17% of personnel.
The council has said that while the headline figure for the cuts has been given as 8.9%, in reality the scale of the cuts is 25% over the next two years.
The implications for its property portfolio are as yet unclear. The council occupies 1.6m sq ft of back office space in the city.
It is in the midst of a town hall transformation project which is intended to restore historic buildings within its portfolio and rationalise the space it occupies, including the town hall extension, central library, Library Walk and St Peter’s Square. Work started in 2010 and is due to be completed by 2014.
The council has a temporary lease until December 2012 of 140,000 sq ft within Ask Developments’ First Street scheme while the town hall complex is overhauled.
Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council, said: “The unfairness of the government’s financial grant settlement for Manchester, one of the five worst in the country, has been widely reported.
“We now have to find £110m in savings next year – £60m more than expected – because of front-loading and the re-distribution of money from Manchester to more affluent areas.
“The accelerated cuts mean we can no longer achieve the staffing reductions we have been forced into through natural turnover which is why we are proposing a time-limited offer of voluntary severance and voluntary early retirement.”
daniel.cunningham@estatesgazette.com
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