Did Mike Whitby really mean 8,000 when he said 800 jobs to go at city council?

I advise anyone with an interest in these matters to take the trouble to attend monthly meetings of the splendid finance and performance scrutiny committee, under the chairmanship of Edgbaston Tory James Hutchings whose forensic examination of senior council officials is gradually exposing under-delivery of the local authority's ambitious business transformation programme.
Put simply, business transformation aims to save the council almost £1 billion over 10 years, largely through investing in better IT systems courtesy of outsourcing company Capita. Coun Hutchings and his colleagues have spent more than a year attempting to wheedle out of business change director Glyn Evans precisely how these savings are to be made.
The answer, naturally, is by slashing jobs among the council's 41,000 non-schools staff since savings of the size required can only realistically be delivered through reducing employment costs. But no one wants to say this publicly, or at least not to expose the extent of what is being planned.
Let's just consider one example. When the council's new website is finally running properly and it is possible for people in Birmingham to pay their bills and order council services online, there will be no need for an army of neighbourhood office staff. Eventually, there may even be no need for neighbourhood offices.
As well as better IT, business transformation is also driving forward the outsourcing of traditional town hall services.
Birmingham's fast-growing elderly population will increasingly in future be left with no alternative but to buy-in meals on wheels and day centre services from the independent and voluntary sectors. Hundreds of people currently in council-run residential care will move out as the city closes its old people's homes. Jobs in these areas are already disappearing at a fast rate of knots, with the likelihood of compulsory redundancies.
But business transformation will only deliver the promised savings if ambitious annual targets are met. Slippage of, say, £10 million a year would result in a £100 million shortfall over the period. And as Coun Hutchings and his committee are discovering, £10 million annual slippage looks about right so far.
To make matters worse, annual budgets for spending departments are worked out on the basis that business transformation savings will be delivered in full.
More than mid-way through the financial year, officials are desperately searching for ways of plugging gaping holes in their budgets. Even more jobs will be sacrificed as a result.
Up until now, Coun Whitby and chief executive Stephen Hughes have relied on the tried and tested formula that it should be possible to avoid compulsory redundancies because the council has in any case a 10 per cent staff turnover each year. So people whose jobs are under threat ought to be able to find another role somewhere in the organisation, even if that means re-training and possibly taking a wage cut.
It is becoming abundantly clear, however, that the vast scale of restructuring required to deliver savings and balance the council books are such that a very large number of jobs will go over the next year or so.
Did Mike Whitby say 800? Perhaps he meant 8,000.