22 Nov 2011
Almost a third of the IT staff at Cheshire councils face the grim prospect of redundancies this Christmas, as bean counters scrabble to shave £1.6m off the IT budget.
The shared IT service established by Cheshire West and Chester Council, along with Cheshire East Council, will begin consultation about the loss of 70 of its 217 IT staff in December, a spokesman for Cheshire East told Computing.
“A ring-fenced voluntary redundancy programme has already been introduced and the [councils] are asking for expressions of interest,” he said.
The Information Communication Technology Service provides IT support for about 12,000 users, including council workers and schools. It oversees more than 5,000 servers situated across 600 sites.
The IT staff are based at five locations in Chester, Winsford, Crewe Macclesfield and Sandbach.
Last year, Andy Heys, the interim head of shared services at Cheshire County Council, told Computing that the establishment of a shared services arrangement had doubled productivity at the unit. At the time, the number of IT staff employed by the councils was cut from 420 to 220.
Heys left his position shortly after, in December 2010.
A spokeswoman for trade union Unison said their officials will be meeting later this week to discuss their response to the redundancy proposals.
Council finance officials are scheduled to meet on Friday to discuss the ongoing overspend at the ICTS, which has only managed to achieve £280k of efficiency savings this year, against a target of £539k. A further £1.6m must be cut from the budget next year.
ICTSS support all of the ICT services for both authorities. How can the two authorities therefore justify employing ICT teams of there own of approx 30 non-operational "strategy" staff? Councillors need to take a serious look into this as well as the money these teams waste on projects with no business cases. In the meantime its operational staff who are made redundant.
Posted by: Auditor 30 Nov 2011
Its ridiculous, its just a scheme so they can make privatise ICT within the council and they can make money off us.
The staff has already struggled to cope with being downsized before, but yet again they are going to cut numbers.
Just greedy conservatives trying to make fast cash, yet again
Posted by: Insider 30 Nov 2011
Having worked in Cheshire Shared Services for a number of years, I find it sad that it's not the superfluous ICT Strategy departments in both Cheshire East and West councils that are being scrutinised, rather than Shared Services itself. Cheshire West ICT Strategy in particular has the unenviable track record of sitting on projects for many weeks at a time, and spending vast sums of money on third-party software that is not fit for purpose - some running well into six figures - instead of utilising in-house development. Shared Services are then tasked with implementing said solutions, and are perceived to be the point of delay, failure and ultimately blamed.
Posted by: Jo 24 Nov 2011
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