Purpose

As part of the budget setting process for
2023/24, DCLT were asked to review operational overheads to achieve
revenue efficiencies to enable the council to reduce the additional
management fee which had been established post COVID-19. The Trust
pursued this under the ETO framework and identified 10 posts that
could be removed from the structure through improvements in digital
process and organisational workloads.
This covered the support service areas of Marketing, Facilities, IT
and Administration. DCLT Board approval and Trade Union
consultation took place and subsequently the posts were placed at
risk of redundancy, as no longer required in the
organisation.
Through consultation it was identified that while opportunities in
the front of house/operations areas were available, staff were not
comfortable being retrained and redeployed and entered into
redundancy talks, with all 10 staff members leaving the
organisation.
The cost of redundancy for the 10 posts is £145k, which will
achieve annual revenue savings of £256k. This saving has been
included in the 2023/24 revenue budget for DCLT and has helped the
Council to reduce the value of the additional management fee
approved in its 2023/24 budget.

Content

To pay DCLT £145k to meet the redundancy
costs of a restructure that will release annual savings of
£256k, and to fund the payment from the severance costs
earmarked reserve.