Nice Christmas present receiving a letter saying you might be made redundant. Next round of redundancies on the way as they need to hack another £24 million off next years budget. Gonna be more ex-council employees than employees soon.

Another cock up--heard they just employed someone and their job may be axed in march.

Better make sure I have a good Christmas..

with my tongue firmly in my cheek, I'll ask, how many Councillors are being made redundant?

An uncertain time, not nice for anybody, I have been in that position myself back in the 80's courtesy of Thatcher, it worries the life out of you, hope all goes well for you.

I believe they are looking again at looking at reducing the number of councillors. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

The population of Wirral is about 320,000 and we have 66 councillors, so the average number of people each councillor is representing is about 4800 (about 2700 households?). Doing some rough guestimating, each a councillor cost every individual about £4 a year (£7 a household?).

Reducing councillor numbers will lead to having a higher ration of professional politicians to men-on-the-street types representing us.

We dont need 66 Councillors half of them dont do much anyway. The ratio you use of people using Councillors is not right. Yes they divide out as 2700 households but and it is a big BUT how many of those 2700 households use or contact their Councillor, not a lot and certainly not all of them. Two Councillors is adequate for a Ward , make them work a bit for their constituents and not just cream off the best bits, going to do's, visits to other countries and all the other perks. Get rid of 22 and put the money saved into somewhere that deserves it like adult care.

The households are represented by their councillors whether they contact their councillor or not. Accountability and lobbying are only a part of a councillor's function.

The more councillors, the more democratic, the less councillors the more it becomes dictatorial. In an ideal world you could just have one councillor - but reality says otherwise.

Don't forget being a councillor is not an occupation, it is a part time voluntary role, most councillors have full time jobs or even run businesses. If they are busy councillors then it is all at a cost to their private lives and/or families.

If councillors did not have (outside) jobs then you would end up with a much narrower viewpoint, I prefer the breadth of representation that we have at the moment.

Having higher numbers also aids continuity and handover, if you had a council with a large number of newcomers after an election then the lack of experience would have significant drawbacks. If you ever read council documents just understanding what is said is complicated, analysing the consequences and possible changes are much harder.

I would like to see a reduction but my concerns are whether enough "good-guys" would remain or whether they would be squeezed out by the fame-seekers and money-grabbers. I'm still sitting on the fence.

Joe is on his way, no need for democracy, councillors or accountability.

Our saviour

I wish someone would stick a pin in him. Could be a nasty explosion but better that than his one man band.

Santos is right to a degree. How many have emailed their local councillor and not yet received a reply ?
We do not need 66 of them on Wirral, and however many households pay towards the bill the total cost for 2013/14 was £754,783.18 (plus amounts for the Mayor & Deputy Mayor)
Not a bad little part time number, and some of them are truly not up to the job.

Over the years, I've emailed my local councillor maybe half a dozen times and not ONCE had a reply. On the other hand, Angela Eagle always gets back to me and follows up later to see if the problem is resolved.

Read Wirral Leaks to see what is happening to YOUR money - latest scandal is £250k of your money handed in "voluntary redundancy" to a council employee who has just popped up doing the same job for an organisation that does contract work for the council. How can his position be redundant if he's back doing the same thing as a contractor? It stinks.

https://wirralleaks.wordpress.com/2015/12/05/contacts/

Didnt know angela eagle was mp for the canary islands

Reducing the number of politicians makes the remaining ones more powerful. If you want a really low cost political system, try a dictatorship.

My personal opinion is that we should have about 8,000 MPs - the square root of the population. This would mean distributing parliament around the country in numerous places and linking them with electronics, so its far too radical to ever happen. They would, individually, be a lot less powerful, and could take on some or all of the duties of local councillors. The main advantage is that the size of a constituency is the same as the size of parliament - about 8,000 - which seems to me to be a fair distribution of political power.

As to the cuts, they are entirely unnecessary, and have more to do with the tories wanting to cut the state down than any economic reason.

But we have no-one to blame but ourselves. We chose this appalling government knowing they were going to go for 'austerity' although I certainly didn't vote for them. Maybe Corbyn will change things for the better next time?

Sorry for your bad news Fish. I hope the axe doesn't fall on you, or anyone for that matter.

Councillors are not Politicians.

Government/Council money is like confetti on a windy day, it goes everywhere except the place you want it to.

Local government politicians.

Ye, you are correct, but they don't have to be a member of any political party. I got mixed up.

We could still do without a number of them.

The old habit of taking redundancy or EVR and then applying for another job within the council has long been a bone of contention with myself. It does stink but I believe that over the years, it has happened more times than we could imagine!

Its the Council Officers who are supposed to be apolitical.



The Civil Service has a small degree of protection from this being abused under some very old rules, however the whole issue is being reviewed for all public service employees HERE

In reality its not as much as a swindle as it may appear, if you work for 20 years, get your 20 year redundancy, then get re-employed for another 10 years and get a 10 year redundancy, it is not that much different from working 30 years and getting a 30 year redundancy.

In fact there is some good to come out of it as it can enable someone to get a lesser or part-time job in later life.

think if you check rules, the max number of years is 20. so that blows away the idea of 20 and then 10 for different employer is the same as 30 for the one employer

Employers make their own rules for redundancy, there is no legal limit on the number of qualifying years.

I just used random figures to demonstrate the principal, use 7 years and 5 years = 12 years if the previous example disturbs you.

The subject we were talking about was returning to the same employer after taking redundancy.

[quote=diggingdeeper]Its the Council Officers who are supposed to be apolitical.



Do I need to belong to a political party to become a councillor?

The majority of people who become councillors do so as a representative of a political party. However, many people stand as independents and candidates on single issues.

What about pensions for those that are reinstated with the council ? Do they have a second pension or is the first one counted as 'broken service'.

Length of service is capped at 20 years and weekly pay is capped at £475. The maximum amount of statutory redundancy pay is £14,250. You can give your staff extra redundancy pay if you want to, or have a qualifying period of less than 2 years.7 Oct 2015



Redundancy pay - Gov.uk

Of course you can be independent, we have had a number of independent councillors in the past but of course you will be self-funding as well, it doesn't come cheap for a successful campaign.

I believe all politicians should be independent and don't see any significant advantages of the party system.

That is for the statutory redundancy scheme, this sets the minimum legal redundancy pay, an employer can offer more.

Heh. Not yet This was when I was living on Wirral (over 40 years).

It is a little warmer out here and tbh, I couldn't give a toss about politics here. But do like to know what is going on back home.

Going back to the first post, its a bit shitty to send out notices before Christmas imo. What harm would a couple of weeks be. Now Christmas has these worries now.

Self Centred council. Humbug.