Schools transferring to academies helping Doncaster Council hit job cuts target

Cabinet members met last week to rubber-stamp plans which includes chopping 80 council staff and 15 Doncaster Children’s Services Trust employee positions over the next three financial years.

This will increase the council tax by 52 pence per week for Band D and 34 pence per week for Band A properties.

Bosses will initially look to delete vacant posts, then seek voluntary redundancies, redeployment and compulsory redundancy being the ‘last resort’.Council tax is also set to go up by 1.99 per cent which is expected to bring in £2.2 million.

But financial forecasts suggests budget black hole at around £7.5million for 2020/21 and £16.8 million over the next three years.The local government settlement in December is also expected to influence the budget which is being considered by a meeting of the full council on March 5, 2020.

But a senior finance boss at DMBC said some of the staffing reductions would be offset by schools being converted into academies.

Debbie Hogg, director of corporate resources, said: "In the grand scheme of things, we have around 1,000 staff at the moment so the reduction is small proportion but we will try to manage it as best we can so we can maintain a continuity of service.

"We are going to be a smaller organisation, we can't get away from that but the numbers are reducing gradually over the period we've set out (until March 2023)

"As academisation occurs those members of staff are not on our books effectively so this does help."