Council offers entire workforce chance to apply for voluntary redundancy

A council is to offer its entire workforce the chance to apply for voluntary redundancy.

The offer by Anglesey Council to its 3,300 staff also applies to teachers and school support staff.

The council said it was also prepared to consider additional requests from staff for sabbaticals, secondments or career breaks.

Anglesey said the move reflected the need to make £20m in cuts to its budget over the next four years. It added that it had recently received one of the lowest provisional local government settlements in Wales.

Chief executive Richard Parry Jones said: “Each year it becomes harder to find savings and many of our services now have little option but to look at their staff.

“It must be stressed that this will not guarantee that an employee can be released. We must still be able to keep the right balance of skills, abilities, experience and knowledge to ensure we can provide the best possible services to the people of Anglesey. There are also a number of key posts that the Authority will be unable to do without and in those instances redundancy isn’t applicable.”

Parry Jones added: “We will, therefore, still reserve the right to refuse individual requests for voluntary redundancy where these might result in a less effective service provision or not be cost effective.”