I was reading a BBC News article covering the reduction in number of 999 calls answered within the target time by Northamptonshire Police; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-19964493

Whilst giving an explanation a spokes person said:

“August 2012 was a challenging month which saw us receive 468 more 999 calls into the control room than we received in August 2011. We were also recruiting new staff to the control room as, since the redundancies were made, further staff have left due to retirements etc. This has meant that for a short period we had 10% less staff than the efficiency savings review recommendation.”

The underlined sentence is the bit that caused the ‘is it me’ moment:

The HR department would have been responsible for deciding how many and who got made redundant to meet cuts; they are also responsible for forward planning in terms of retirements and replacements.

So a number of people got made redundant; then we had a number of people who retired, which should have been known by HR several months in advance.

To my mind, if they had waited for the retirements; not replaced them and not made the redundancies they could have made less cuts because they would not have had to pay out redundancy pay.

I wonder how many of the people made redundant got re-hired – still on the plus side; that would save money in not having to train them.