MORE than £6.5 million was paid out to council staff across Surrey through redundancy and exit packages last year, writes Local Democracy Reporter Rebecca Curley.

Data released from all 11 borough and district authorities, plus Surrey County Council, show a total of £6,539,134 was paid in 2017/18 - around £1m less than the year before.

Of the 11 councils, Waverley Borough Council paid out £132,758 for ten compulsory redundancies and one ‘other departure’ in 2017/18 - up from just £1,183 the year before.

Surrey made 38 compulsory redundancies with 33 staff members leaving under ‘other departures’. Its total for exit packages costs came to £3,869,000 - down from £4,483,000.

Compulsory redundancy is where employees leave after a consultation and selection process for the role based on criteria such as performance. ‘Other departures’ includes where settlements have been reached by the employee and the organisation or through a union or where staff have left of their own accord.

In total, including Surrey County Council, 177 members of staff were made redundant or left through ‘other departures’.

Responding, Gavin Davies, membership development officer for the GMB Union Southern Region said: “The GMB is concerned about the number of redundancies that are taking place within local authorities whereby we are seeing our hard working members losing their jobs via means of redundancies or other means.

“The GMB urges the government to put more investment into public services to avoid the natural shrinking of resources that we currently enjoy.”

A county council spokesman added: “Like all local authorities we face huge financial pressures and growing demand for our services and we need to reduce our budget gap by £250m over the next three years. We are working on ways to address this and avoid the additional costs and while we will undoubtedly have to make some difficult decisions such as looking at staff numbers, we’re also transforming the way we work to ensure we can meet the needs of our residents.”