More jobs go as work on houses winds down
Monday 28th June 2010, 11:30AM BST.
Jobs are being axed by the company behind a £425 million revamp of council homes in the Black Country – with 30 already having left their posts.
West Bromwich-based Connaught will slash jobs when its contract with Sandwell Homes to transform 29,000 council houses in the borough as part of the Decent Homes programme comes to an end in December.
Around 30 people working on the project have already left the company.
No redundancies have yet been made and the company is now in a statutory consultation period and said it is looking at the opportunities for retaining and redeploying people.
Company spokesman Paul Haines, said: “Because our contract with Sandwell Homes will be coming to an end in December, we have been forced to place our employees on this contract at risk of redundancy.
“We have agreed to requests from 30 employees to leave immediately. For the remainder of our employees, we are exploring opportunities to either redeploy or reassign as many as possible.
“Wherever possible we will also try to accommodate any further requests from staff to leave.
“However this will be on a phased basis to ensure that we can continue to fulfil our obligations to Sandwell Homes for the remainder of our contract.”
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But surely Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron are saying that the private sector will create jobs and wealth, and the public sector is moribund and inefficient and doesn’t produce jobs!
Surely there’s been a mistake – the private sector is just so efficient and great, they can’t possibly be laying people off.
Surely the great, efficient and effective private sector is strong and powerful.
Surely the public sector, commissioning all those decent homes and social housing, is just a waste of time and generates nothing to the economy – it must be true because the Great Coalition, saviours of our nation, are waging a crusade against it.
Thank you, voters of Halesowen & Rowley Regis, Stourbridge and Wolverhampton West for helping give us this government.
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Whilst I agree with the tenor of your argument in this case it is a situation of the work being completed. There is a limit to the number of times that you can do up a house. Depending on the nature of the contract you may have to put some one ‘at risk’ in order to redeploy them. Three small points
1. Some local authorities use ‘at risk’ to mess people about. Been there, had it happen to me!
2. The E & S would have been better in using a picture of house being done up and not houses being built – as far as I know Connaughts built no houses at all.
3. Did any one vote for a coalition? Five months because something had to happen would be OK, but five years of what we did not even get asked about is a tad rich from a party wanting electoral reform!
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Your point 3 is irrelevant. Voters don’t get to vote on government, they don’t get to vote on what government does. Voters only get to vote on who will be their local representative in council or parliament – nothing more.
As for the story – yes, contracts come to an end. Its up to the company to find new contracts – not up to councils or government to give new contracts merely to keep private sector jobs.
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So when you vote in the general election and put your cross by the candidate of your choice then thats got nothing to do with your preffered government then?
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stjoe, thats right. You decide which candidate standing locally gets your vote. One of the candidates standing will win. A party with more candidates than other parties who become MPs is the government.
They can do coalitions, make deals, save the economy, ruin the economy and take us to war. But yours and mine decision making starts and ends with voting for the candidate of our choice.
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Well people voted for them they knew what to expect, personally my conscience is clear.
CONservativies
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Well I’m sure most LibDem voters, if they thought about being in a coalition goverment, would have thought it would have been with Labour & not the Cons
Mr Clegg, will rue the day he got into bed with the Tory’s. Everyone thinks, oh that budget last week wasn’t that bad. Unfortuntely guys, Osbourne going to drip out the really bad news over the next 18 months, hopefully for him, on a big news day like Price & Andre getting back together
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Its not up to the voters to decide issues like coalitions. Maybe party members, depending on the party, ratify or not some agreements.
Not the first time we have had coalition government. Coalition councils are pretty common – with Tory and LibDem allying without problem. So why is it an issue at national level?
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Hang on, just a few weeks ago weren’t you lot hammering Sandwell Council? Now all of sudden there’s a Con/Lib govt (which nobody voted for by the way) and the Council are golden?
Off the top of my head, the complaint list was:
* Spending £8m on agency staff
* Spending £400k on a road island
* Spending £79m on The Public (ok Arts Council partly)
* Voting in a wage restructure meaning people lost on average £1400 last year.
All great decisions under a Labour govt.
Fact is Sandwell Council aren’t renewing the contract – nothing to do with Connaught. Fact is Sandwell Council could choose to build actual council homes and create jobs – but they aren’t.
Fact it, Sandwell Council should probably convert The Public in to flats and Connaught could have that contract :)
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Fact is Sandwell Council aren’t renewing the contract – nothing to do with Connaught. Fact is Sandwell Council could choose to build actual council homes and create jobs – but they aren’t.
Can’t have your cake and eat it!! You all wanted cuts so you helped put this government in. This government says the private sector will create most of the new jobs..How? The pulic sector money helps do that as well with contracts to private firms. You all need to decide what it is you all want?? Cuts in councils or to spend money on creating jobs!!
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Not disputing the fact that many private sector jobs rely on public sector services and contracts. I’m very in favour of the public sector.
What I’m pointing out (poorly, obviously) is that in Sandwell you have an horrendously mismanaged council that seems to have its priorities wrong.
If it managed its money properly we’d all be better off!
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On that I think we can probably all agree.
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Its Sandwell Homes not Sandwell Council..the fact SH are not renewing the contract with Connaught is because they have been very dissapointing with there decent homes involvement simple as that
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It isn’t Sandwell Council – it is Sandwell Homes.
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Run and owned by Sandwell mbc
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Its all very well moaning about the current governemnt making cutbacks to sort out the mess made by Labour and Gordon Brown. Mr Brown was the worst prime minister we ever had and he has run this country into the ground by mortgaging our kids future with the debts he has run up. Our kids will be paying for Brown’s mistakes for generations.
The problem is that left-wing public sector biased voters genuinely seem to believe that governments can carry on running massive budget deficits forever.
The current government really only has only two choices. Choice 1 is to make unpopular but selective cuts and restore public finances to some kind of order. Choice 2 is to just ignore the problems and carry on borrowing and spending like crazy to prop up a bloated public sector.
The likely outcome of choice 2 would be that the UK would very quickly become credit blacklisted in the eyes of the world and this could result in a complete breakdown in public services which would be far worse than choice 1, the selective but unpopular cuts being forced on the government.
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You wil probably want to review that statement of the worst PM in about 12 months time.
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Time will tell.
I honestly never expected someone could be worse than Tony, and along came Gordon to prove me wrong.
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