Bedford Borough Council "carefully" considering employee welfare as it looks to make cuts to use of temporary staff

As Bedford Borough Council looks to make cuts to using temporary staff to save money, managers are “carefully” considering staff welfare when ensuring services are still being delivered, a meeting heard.

Martin Foster, GMB Beds county branch secretary, told the Employee Partnership Committee (Tuesday, November 29) that the council has indicated it will be making in-house savings of £6.5million this financial year.

“And a further £11.5million, I think, next year, obviously that’s a considerable amount of money,” he said.

“I don’t know if that is still the financial position after the autumn statement but that’s the latest figures we’ve been given.

“Can you give us an update on whether that’s still the position?” he asked.

The council’s chief executive, Laura Church, said the council have been “very open” that there is an in-year overspend and a report was recently sent to executive and will be shared at full council.

“That report looks at the work that we’ve been doing on managing the in-year deficit, “she said.

“So actions have been taken to deal with around £5 million of the overspend, but that still leaves us with a challenge.”

Ms Church said the council is looking at all agency and recruitment requests, but it is still getting people in to deliver front-line services. The council’s management team is also assessing spending requests that are over £10,000.

“Looking forward to 23/24 there are a number of announcements in the autumn statement and one of the challenges for us is that we won’t get the local government financial settlement until December 21,” she said.

“We may have some indications of some of the policy thinking around that coming out in the next couple of weeks.

“We aren’t seeing that there is significant additional funding coming to local authorities to support budget pressures, but we do know that there is likely to be some special support for adult social care or for social care,” she said.

Mr Foster wanted some reassurance on the possible implications to council staff if agency hires are reduced.

“We’ve also got to think about the wellbeing of staff and we might need to fill some positions to ease the pressure on others,” he said.

Ms Church said: “Managers are looking very carefully at that and they’re putting forward the posts to the management team to consider when they think that they are critical.

“That means that there’s also a lot of thinking about who and what resources they need to deliver their services within their teams,” she said.