Council leaders in Coventry say they need to save £61m over the next three years to help meet a budget shortfall.
The council said the measures it was looking at included cutting £3m from its community services, including adult social care, libraries and wardens.
Leaders at the Labour-run council also say council tax will increase by 2% next year. Previously they were also said to be cutting up to 800 jobs.
Union officials said the cuts could potentially mean “Armageddon” The number of job losses planned at councils in England and Wales because of Government spending cuts has increased to over 37,000 in recent weeks.
The GMB union said 27 local authorities had announced or threatened staff losses, with many more set to follow suit as the scale of their budget cuts becomes known.
Thousands of workers in Birmingham, Walsall, Croydon, Sheffield and Rhondda Cynon Taff faced having new terms and conditions imposed on them, while councils across the country were having to make huge savings over the next four years, the union added.
And please remember- 76 percent of the current cuts have yet to be implement.
It was reiterated the warnings that entire services run by the authority, which has an annual budget of about £1bn, would have to be “decommissioned” to meet the budget shortfall. He said he also expected the figures of claims to rise. But he did not seem certain. Does he know anything?
The council leader ”said the authority could only afford to borrow £429m of the £757m figure without having to get special dispensation from the government to take out more loans”.
All this ‘bunkum’ about what can be affected financially should be treated very cautiously. After the last World War we were apparently broke, but we still created a National Health Service.
The West Midlands Pensioners are proud to have supported these mainly women workers in their struggles.
It has been announced that almost £4bn a year off the governments welfare bill will be slashed by uprating Britain’s poorest families by just 1% a year until 2015. I assume this will affect people on Pension Credit, but at the time of writing this is not clear. Austerity measures will be extended to 2018, as debt-cutting targets are missed, the Autumn Statement revealed. Other information to follow and must mention the proposed 3 pence petrol increases to be intoduced in the new year. We surely must plan for even larger campaigns in the New Year. Happy festivities to all.
Ivor Timson 