Sheffield City Council: Calls to freeze council recruitment of £100,000 workers blocked

Liberal Democrat and Green Party councillors have blocked Labour’s calls to freeze the recruitment of highly paid employees into £100,000 per year jobs, despite the council finding itself in a “challenging financial position,” it is claimed.

Sheffield City Council is projected to overspend by £21.7million this year in the latest financial update given in August, a number increasing month on month, after being £19m in June.

MORE: Sheffield Council already facing ‘massive’ budget deficit

In the meeting, Councillor Brian Lodge, co-chair of the council’s finance committee, said: “Faced with the current situation…I’d like to propose and put to the committee as an amendment is that we implement a freeze on recruitment for positions over £100,000 while we concentrate focus on the budget.

“We need to respond to comments and concerns from members of the public about where we are spending money.”

MORE: Sheffield Council budget: We answer your questions as ‘finances spiral out of control’

Councillor Lodge argued that Labour councillors were not proposing that senior posts go unfilled – but that the council already has staff who could take on additional responsibilities.

Liberal Democrat and Green Party Councillors on the committee shut this suggestion down, with Lib Dems saying they couldn’t make the decision without knowing the full implications.

Deputy chair of the finance sub-committee, Coun Mike Levery, said: “There was no information for us to make a decision.

"It was not on the agenda and there was no information on what it was about. Working to an agenda and dropping this in at the end is not the way to do it.

"Quite rightly, we shouldn’t be dealing with proposals that Labour put forward at the end of a meeting.”

Coun Levery also said one of the vacancies, which recruitment would be frozen for under Labour’s proposal, is in one of the departments worst affected by the Council’s budget, which their website described as a “challenging financial position”.

After the vote, Coun Lodge said the current hung council is making it harder for Labour to “take the strong action needed to get on top of finances”.

He also accused Lib Dems and Greens of “misleading the public” by telling them the council is a “Labour run administration”.