DURING the worst budget restraints Dorset has ever seen, the county has struggled to cope in the past 12 months after experiencing confirmed cuts of around £67million.

Although the full extent of the cuts is still not clear, the county has already has lost hundreds of jobs, businesses and services to the cutbacks since the Comprehensive Spending Review in October 2010.

The knock-on effect will add many more millions to the final bill.

In this week-long special report chief reporter Miriam Phillips, will look at the worst affected areas, how our local authorities are coping with the changes and how our county hospital has pulled itself out from its spiralling financial black hole.

Following this look at the county as a whole we will be reviewing the local authorities with a series of exclusive interviews, examining our 999 emergency services, businesses, and highlighting the real tragedies of these cuts.

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THE county needs to brace itself for more cuts to come as council chiefs at Dorset County Council say they need to find £14million in order to balance the books.

It comes as a direct result of the crippling cuts announced by the Government as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review in October 2010 where the council was told it faced cuts of more than £50million.

A year on and that figure is now £57.5million which is the biggest cut the council has had to make in living memory. Despite axing 500 posts and identifying every spare penny available in the last year the council are bracing themselves for another round of cuts – which are still to be identified.

In an exclusive interview with the Echo the county council’s leader Angus Campbell said there had been a ‘seismic shift’ in the way that local Government is funded and that the council, its staff and members have worked flat out to cope with the unprecedented cuts.

During this period of unrest thousands of unionists, staff members and members of the public have took to the streets and marched through the county town to mark “the death of public services in Dorset.”

Since the cuts started last November the council has identified savings to be made of £46 million over three years, including the financial year we are in.

That means that this year the council are making £31million in cuts, and for the following two years it has a target of achieving £46million of the £57.5million it has to save.

On top of a funding gap of £11million, the council has made a £3million overspend this year because of demands from departments that cannot be avoided, such as elderly care.

Chief executive David Jenkins said: “We have in place at the moment a series of meetings across our budget working group which consists is leading members of the county council who are meeting with senior officers to come up with proposals about how we achieve that £7.5million next year and £6.5million the year after on top of our existing savings programmes.”

Once any areas of savings is highlighted the recommendations will go to overview committees, cabinet and then ultimately the 45 elected members of the council who will decide where the axe falls.

Leader of the council Angus Campbell said there was no option other than coming up with a way to find the remaining £14million.

He said: “It does have to be achieved because we have to have a balanced budget – it has to be found. “The argument can be about where you find it but it has to be found.”

He said that the council did not know at this point where the cuts would come from or where they go from here, A total of 167 redundancies were made between January and September this year, which made the number of full time posts 432 fewer than this time last year. Mr Jenkins said that of those only 40 were compulsory, and that a recruitment freeze helped to deal with the cutbacks. Mr Jenkins described the cuts as fast and unprecedented and added: “Clearly nobody enjoys doing this but it has to be done as fairly and dispassionately as we can.

“I’m very sorry that there have been any casualties at all but the number of casualties through compulsory redundancies are a lot lot less than they would have been if we hadn’t been managing this so carefully.”

In order to plug this Government shortfall there will be significant cuts facing Dorset in the next few years in what the leader described as a ‘very difficult time’.

He said: “We are trying to deal with the significant problems the country faces. It's not easy and as time goes on it will be harder.

“Looking at next year and the year after there will be less money around.”

He said that all public services would have to work closely together in order to achieve these drastic savings.

Council relief at bank ruling

DORSET County Council has hailed a ruling about Icelandic bank Landsbanki as having ‘huge significance’.

The authority had £15million of assets in the bank frozen in 2008 after its collapse.

On October 28 the Icelandic Supreme Court found in favour of UK local authorities, which means that authorities like Dorset County Council will have their claims made a priority over other creditors.

County council leader Angus Campbell said: “Like many other UK local authorities, Dorset County Council had deposits with Landsbanki which have been frozen for more than three years, and this decision is of huge significance.”

The ruling means that Dorset County Council and other UK local authorities will be paid back first.

A spokesman for Dorset County Council said that the council would recover almost all of the money that was deposited with Landsbanki.

The county council also had deposits in Landsbanki’s UK subsidiary Heritable Bank.

So far administrators have repaid £8.6million or 65 per cent of the £13.1million the county council had deposited in Heritable.

The county expects to reclaim at least 20 per cent more over the next year or so.

The spokesman said that the cost of legal action against Landsbanki and Heritable had been kept to a minimum by co-ordinating their efforts with other local authorities.

He said: “The way in which the Local Government Association and our legal advisers have co-ordinated the legal action with other local authorities has minimised legal costs while allowing us to advance the strongest possible arguments to secure this result.

“The cost of litigation to date amounts to less than one per cent of the amount we expect to recover.”

Cuts the county has faced

• Dorset County Council – shortfall of £57million – lost 500 roles and of that 167 redundancies

• Weymouth Borough Council – 28 per cent cuts totalling £1,454,000

• West Dorset District Council – 25 per cent cuts totalling £1,934,000

• Dorset County Hospital – Was facing a deficit of £5.1million two years ago – now predicting a surplus of £700,000 by the end of this financial year.

• Dorset Fire and Rescue Service – Six per cent cut in funding

• Dorset Police – £6.3million in cuts – 20 per cent of the workforce to be axed

• Coastguard – Weymouth coastguard control centre scrapped in 2015 and Portland Search and Rescue helicopter to be axed in 2017 – a loss of 50 jobs in total.

Services which have taken a hit:

• Libraries

• Lollipop patrols

• Weymouth Women’s refuge

• Day centres

How have you been affected?

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