Extra funding is needed for IT staff at the Dorset Council – unless it wants to face the consequences of up to 25 lost jobs and the chaos the loss of skills could cause to the new authority.

A report says between £500,000 and £1million is needed to secure ICT projects to support the work of the new council when it comes into being in April 2019.

“The consequence of failing to secure income for ICT project work will result in a risk of overspend for which the primary mitigation would be restructuring to reduce ICT staffing… This would result in c.25+ redundancies,” said a hard-hitting report to Wednesday’s county council cabinet.

The report, prepared by senior financial officers, says that unless funding can be approved the new council would be at risk of operating unsupported business applications and trying to maintain systems and machines which are at the end of their working life, putting business service provision at risk.

Part of the problem in resolving the issue has been the regulations concerning employees’ transfer of rights which prevents the issue being addressed before convergence of the existing councils to one new, unitary council in April 2019. The new Council also needs clarity over its future ICT requirements before it can commit to the future projects required to deliver them.

“The matrix approach to skills and capacities across DCC ICT services staffing means that a reduction of such magnitude quickly would result in significant operational risk resulting from the loss of expertise.

“The loss of such capacity would mean that Dorset Council will lose the ability to resource project work originating with the Dorset County Council ICT services to deliver essential infrastructure, application and transformation projects. Dorset Council would need to fall back on relying on resource recruited at the point of need, introducing time delays and potentially increased cost if contract or agency staffing is used.”