Unpaid-leave plan could save £1m

Oldham council overview budget meeting
TOWN-HALL workers could be forced into unpaid leave in a bid to save more than £1million.

Cash-strapped Oldham Council is in negotiations with trade unions to implement the proposal where staff would receive no pay for three days over 12 months.

The authority said the move would generate £1.23million from the 2012/13 budget — a year in which the council must make £24.5million in savings.

Original plans regarding reductions in sick pay and incremental pay rises have since been removed.

Councillor Abdul Jabbar, Cabinet member for finance, said this is a cut the council doesn’t want to make but has a duty to balance the budget. He said: “It is a pay cut, but in fact people are getting three days off work and the days are spread over a 12-month period.

“Sometimes you get people who ask for conditional unpaid leave and for some employees it could be a welcome initiative.”

The Chronicle revealed last year how 400 council jobs could face the chop. The council says changing the terms and conditions could reduce the number of compulsory redundancies.

Estimates suggest the council will have saved £130million from 2009 to 2015.

Liberal Democrat councillor, John McCann, called the revised proposals “fair” at a further scrutiny meeting into the budget at the civic centre last night.

He said: “This is much fairer, if there can be such a thing as a fairer proposal for such a thing.

“A lot of other companies do unpaid leave and they do it successfully, but it is about how it is managed.”