Cut jobs to make council lean and mean, says leader

Council leader Alan Graves said sickness absence needed to be tackled

The leader of Derbyshire County Council has said the authority is "20% overstaffed" and he wants to cut jobs to make the council "lean and mean".

Councillor Alan Graves said he was currently speaking to unions about reducing jobs at the authority, which has 10,000 employees.

He was unable to say which council departments or specific roles would be affected but said compared to other authorities, Derbyshire was "well overstaffed".

The union Unite, which represents council employees, said the figures were in dispute and certain departments were actually understaffed.

Graves said: "We are going through a process, but we have identified the fact we are 20% overstaffed, so there's quite a lot of staff that need to come out.

"We have a lot of agency staff, and we need to look at those and cut them down. We have looked at comparable authorities and we are well overstaffed.

"I've had meetings with the unions, and we have nothing to say to them yet, we are going through this exercise of making sure our council is lean and mean."

Reform UK took charge at the county council in May

Speaking on BBC Radio Sheffield, Graves said sickness absence needed to be tackled.

"We have professionals in the HR department looking at this all the time, and we need to have proper strategies to help people back into work," he added.

"We have far too many agency staff across the council. It's inherent, from not just the last administration but ones before that, and I don't know why they have allowed it to come to this point, but we have been in since May and we have said this is not acceptable."

Dave Ratchford, of Unite, said the union did not accept the figures.

"We have asked for the evidence and for councillor Graves to show us the figures. When did this figure of 20% overstaffing emerge? We have no evidence that this is the case.

"We do have evidence that the SEND [special educational needs and disabilities] teams are grossly understaffed and there is chronic understaffing in some areas, such as social work.

"It is true there is a high proportion of agency staff and that creates instability with consistency and continuation.

"We are happy to discuss anything that may protect future stability for both services and employees."