1,500 council jobs to be lost over three years

Kirklees Council, which runs services in Huddersfield and Dewsbury, has asked 11,200 staff to consider applying for voluntary redundancy.

It says 8,000 school staff will not be affected by the cuts, as the education budget is ring-fenced.

Council leaders say overall budgets need to be reduced by around 20 per cent to deal with the expected squeeze on public spending after the General Election later this year.

Other Yorkshire authorities are in the process of planning similar cuts in spending.

Kirklees Council chief executive Rob Vincent said yesterday: "We won't know the detail of the reductions required until after the General Election but we are already planning for the future."

He added: "Reducing costs by up to 20 per cent will mean a significant reduction in numbers of staff, but we must do all we can to avoid compulsory redundancies.

"With that in mind we have today written to all our direct employees to see if any would be interested in taking voluntary severance terms."

The council's human resources director Cliff Stewart said: "We are also developing retraining arrangements so that staff can move into vacant jobs and we are not filling vacancies where work can be undertaken in other ways."

The announcement by Kirklees Council follows predictions of widespread redundancies in the public sector across Yorkshire and the UK. In October, a leaked Leeds Council document suggested the authority could slash its workforce by a fifth over the next five years.