EIGHT hundred redundancy notices have been issued at Oldham Borough Council.
Officials of Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council have confirmed to the GMB that the council have issued the statutory advanced notice of redundancy (HR1 form).
The HR1 refers to all departments, but social care looks likely to bear the brunt of the threatened job losses.
Giovanna Holt, GMB Senior Organiser, said: ‘These job losses will be devastating for the whole of Oldham. The impact will not be just on the employees who lose their jobs but on local services as well.
‘The current level of job losses being notified by councils like Oldham, and city councils such as Birmingham and Sheffield, will not be mitigated with new jobs in the private sector.
‘Those who think that they will, are indulging in pure fantasy. These public sector job cuts will in fact mean losses in the private sector as well. For many, many households in Oldham the effects will be devastating.’
Meanwhile, A Darzi private treatment centre in Greater Manchester has become the first in the country to close its doors after NHS managers admitted it was an unaffordably expensive luxury.
And NHS Stockport has also decommissioned its 8am-8pm GP-led health centre after admitting it was duplicating existing services and haemorrhaging cash.
The BMA recently called for the centres to be closed in areas where they were failing to prove their worth.
The Stockport centre, run by out-of-hours provider Mastercall, will continue to provide an out-of-hours service on evenings and weekends, but will stand empty during the day.
Dr Melanie Wynne-Jones, a GP in Stockport, said the move demonstrated that Lord Darzi’s policy was ‘ill-conceived’.
Wynne-Jones said: ‘This was centrally driven, and the money should have stayed in mainstream general practice where it could have been spent more effectively on patient services.’
