MORE JOBS AXED IN THE CITY

ANOTHER 500 Coventry jobs are to be axed by the new government.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency – based at The Butts – will be scrapped. It follows the government’s announcement last week that it is to axe Coventry-based government agency Becta, with 330 job losses.

With a jobs freeze expected at a third city government agency – the Skills Funding Agency in Cheylesmore – about 1,000 jobs will be taken out of the city’s economy.

Labour politicians reacted with fury, saying it could plunge the city and country back into recession, with the West Midlands already suffering the country’s highest jobless rates.

The QCDA only moved into its award-winning new building at The Butts earlier this year, after relocating from London. Staff were told the grim news last Thursday.

The axe has been hovering since Prime Minister David Cameron announced last year the QCDA was top of his hitlist for abolishing such arms-length government agencies, called quangos.

Some staff had hoped for a reprieve after it was left out of chancellor George Osborne’s first round of £6bn public sector cuts announced on Monday May 24.

But education secretary Michael Gove wrote to QCDA bosses on Thursday May 27 confirming legislation to axe it will be introduced this autumn.

One worker, a Coventry resident who asked not to be named, said hundreds of workers gathered to hear Mr Gove’s letter read out.

He said: “Afterwards someone said it’s a bit like your husband having an affair and you’re denying it and denying it until he actually sits you down and tells you.

“There was an eerie silence and I saw one pregnant member of staff with tears in her eyes.

“That’s 500 jobs lost in Coventry. It leaves the people who’ve just moved here from London in a real mess.”

The QCDA closure is expected to be pushed through the Commons with majority support from the ruling coalition of Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs.

The coalition government believes it can cut government waste and bureaucracy to help pay down the £156bn budget deficit, while seeking to protect frontline services.

Before the election, the Lib Dems supported Labour in arguing such cuts should be postponed until next year when better economic growth is forecast, to prevent renewed recession.

Some of the QCDA’s work overseeing schools testing and the curriculum could now pass to the Department for Education and other organisations.

The Public and Commercial Services union has vowed to fight any redundancies.

Labour Coventry City Council leader John Mutton said: “The Tories are trying to decimate Coventry, just like they did last time, when we lost 60,000 jobs in one year and 20,000 in one day.”

Labour Coventry North West MP Geoffrey Robinson said the Tories hated the state, and were driven by dogma to “take a machete to civil service jobs”, which would plunge the country back into recession.

Teachers’ unions in Coventry contest the closures will produce savings, saying the support of the city’s education quangos had saved individual schools time and money.