THE county council still does not know how many staff will leave as part of a multi-million transformation plan – but the number will be ‘absolutely minimised’.

The £18m Fit for the Future programme was agreed by Oxfordshire County Council last September as part of a plan to invest in services.

Senior council officers said it would help to stop the council ‘salami slicing’ services after years of cuts.

In the autumn the council said that up to 890 members of staff might be lost. But it has consistently said it expects that number to be much lower because of natural churn – generally, people leaving to go to new jobs – and redeployment within the authority.

It emerged at a meeting on Thursday that much of the £18m will be spent on improving IT services – and the council believes that just under £50m can be saved through new ways of working as part of the three-year project.

Yvonne Rees, the county council’s chief executive, said its staff were ‘absolutely at the forefront’ of the changes.

She told councillors: “You went into the transformation programme knowing that there would be some loss of employment. I would never stand up in front of any member of staff and say I can guarantee their job for forever and forever.

“You have a significant amount of churn in the organisation and…work we’re doing and work you saw back in November (at a previous meeting) was about us considering our vacancies so that you don’t suddenly recruit Mrs Smith here when Mrs Smith version two over there is doing pretty much the same job and is let go.

“There is a more robust look at that now.”

Liz Brighouse, the leader of the county council’s Labour group, said she had been assured there were ‘not necessarily going to be (890) redundancies because a lot will be redeployments from one bit of the organisation to another’.

Amongst potential improvements through Fit for the Future, Liz Leffman said she wanted residents to feel confident that the council would do work when necessary.

The Liberal Democrat councillor for Charlbury and Wychwood said: “We’ve got to move away from people being surprised when something gets done to assuming they can contact the council and get things done when they need it done.

“This is absolutely at the heart of it. It’s about making sure they get the services.”

The council’s director of finance, Lorna Baxter, said it was aware of what the impact on its workforce might be – but that decisions have yet to be made, just a few months into the programme.

She said: “Some people might leave the organisation, some might be redeployed, some people might find themselves another job. It’s impossible to come up with anything (at present).

“Obviously we need to be mindful of it, we need to get a sense of what the scale might be.”