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COUNCIL executives who are made redundant when Wiltshire moves to one super council will receive a quadrupled severance package.

Wiltshire is in the process of shedding a tier of local government and is merging the four district and one country authority into a single unitary council.

The process is designed to reduce costs and promote efficiency so the people of Wiltshire will have better council services. The number of officers likely to be made redundant in the process of change is not yet finalised but around £7m has been set aside to cover the costs of the severances.

At a meeting of the implementation executive on July 7 councillors representing all five councils agreed to introduce the costly redundancy package for staff. Any council worker who loses their job as a result of the unitary cuts will receive four times the redundancy package owed to them.

According to union sources, it is the top-level executives who will be targeted during the first round of redundancies, meaning high-ranking council officers on large salaries will be the first to benefit from the super pay out.

The news comes during a week when hundreds of local government workers, many in the lower tiers of the public sector hierarchy, held a strike over pay and protested outside County Hall.

A source from UNISON, the biggest organisation representing the interests of public sector workers in the UK, said the decision was suspicious.

"The deal is for all council workers from the top level executives down to the lowest paid workers which is a good thing on the surface," he said.

"We expect it will be high-ranking, highly-paid executives who will be made redundant in advance of unitary because there will be an excess of chief executives, deputy executives, chief finance officers and so on so it looks like the decision was made to protect them."

Wiltshire County Council said: "There are no new national severance or pension arrangements in relation to the move towards one council.

"Because the five councils each has a different arrangement under these statutory provisions the implementation executive decided in the interest of equity and equality to harmonise these arrangements.

"They agreed to adapt discretionary compensation arrangements that would enable people made redundant to receive up to four times the normal redundancy payout.

"It is anticipated that the severance arrangements will not create significant additional transitional costs for the One Council for Wiltshire project."

2:17pm Friday 18th July 2008

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