Axing hundreds of council jobs cost the borough almost £1m in redundancy pay-outs, the Observer can reveal.
Figures from Rochdale council show that £997,735 was paid out to 149 former employees who were made redundant last year.
It means each employee received an average redundancy pay out of £6,700.
A further 278 people also quit the authority by taking voluntary redundancy or early retirement.
The cost of the severance packages received by these former employees has not been revealed by the council.
The cuts were made as part of Rochdale council's programme to cut £64m from its 2011/12 budget.
As well as cutting services and budgets, a total of 427 former staff left the council as part of the cost cutting drive through voluntary and forced redundancy.
In total, 493 posts were axed, 213 of which already vacant.
Some of those who were at risk of losing their jobs from deleted posts were able to move into jobs vacated by people taking voluntary redundancy, or by positions that were already vacant. The cuts mean that the authority currently employs 4,152 people, as of January 2012.
However this could dip below the 4,000 mark as another 200 jobs could be lost in the next round of cuts, which are due to be finalised next month.
Those figures do not include schools staff employed by the council.
Rochdale council leader, Councillor Colin Lambert, said they had worked hard to keep the number of compulsory redundancies to a minimum.
He said: "Before we took over the council there was a salami-slicing approach to saving money and people were not being given the opportunity to re-train or move to a different department.
"Our approach has been to let those who want to retire or take redundancy to go and to move those whose jobs were deleted into those posts to reduce the number of people facing compulsory redundancy to an absolute minimum."
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I suppose this article is meant to be a criticism of the Council. Some idiots will of course comment by saying they shouldnt be paid anything, disgusting, a drain on the taxpayer. What we all have to ask ourselves here is:- In light of there being no medium or large employers in Rochdale what do these now unemployed people do. look at the bigger picture - how much will these job losses cost the Country in benefit payouts, medical cost (due to depression, Etc) the cost of unpaid mortgages and bills, other businesses affected by these people not paying their bills, Etc, Etc. It's all very sad.
My son was made redundant after 12 years service with R.M.B.C. in finance what happened then was that the managers and other staff were all upgraded and one manger even manged to get his wife into the department via the impact partnership!! Councillor Lambert says they had worked hard to keep redundancies to a minimum, but in reality it was if your face does'nt fit out you go take a long hard look at your managers Mr. Lambert they are stage managing everything... which was always the case, Thankfully I retired 3 years ago from RMBC who are no longer either an investor in people nor a good employer>
It's bizarre, sacking people to save money is an expensive business all round.
I'm with Peter on this one.