POOLE council staff are in the front line as the borough seeks to save £1.5m in employee costs.

However even if staff and unions do accept a raft of cost cutting proposals, ranging from voluntarily reducing working hours to paying for parking, they have been warned this will not prevent further job losses.

And public sector union Unison has condemned the proposals to reduce terms and conditions, blasting them as “miserly and politically driven cuts”.

They come after the fair pay review in which 13 per cent of staff lost pay, some thousands of pounds, and now face the threat of losing their final salary pension schemes, under the Hutton report.

At 70 per cent of the net budget, staff costs are the Borough of Poole’s biggest expense and the cash strapped council is consulting with unions and staff in a bid to rein them in.

“There will be redundancies because there will be things we will be told (by government) we will not be doing any more,” said council leader, Cllr Elaine Atkinson.

However many of the proposals, which will go before cabinet next Wednesday came from employees she said, and if staff and unions agreed some reductions, it could mean fewer job losses.

Having slashed £14m from the 2011/12 budget, which included a reduction of 162 posts, of which 59 were voluntary or compulsory redundancies, the borough needs to save a further £13m over the next two years.

The 14 cost-cutting proposals which emerged include scrapping contractual overtime and unsociable hours payments, a temporary freeze on incremental pay awards on top of a general pay freeze and no sick pay for the first two or three days.

A review of redundancy pay, cuts in mileage from a maximum of 65p to 42p a mile, a review of agency staff and subscriptions for professional bodies and magazines, a freeze of the £94 contribution towards spectacles and scrapping the £150 award for 30 years’ service will also be considered.

“At a time when the council is facing unprecedented pressures on our budgets, we believe these proposals are the best way to preserve jobs and protect services,” said Cllr Atkinson.

Kevin Judd, branch secretary of the local Unison branch said: “Many of the proposed changes will hit members hard. Their goodwill will be called into question and the council knows that many staff have given many hours of unpaid overtime to keep services going in the past.

“Is it worth that goodwill being threatened by miserly and politically driven cuts to conditions amongst the Cinderella service of the public sector?”