Birmingham bankruptcy shows you miss age, experience and wisdom While it is clear that Birmingham city council move towards declaring itself bankrupt is apparently a result of poor financial and HR management meaning they face compensation pay outs plus hundred million pounds of IT failures, as well as the impact of long term government funding cuts there is also the question of what happens when you lay off all your older staff. When we carried out post 2008 financial crisis FOI research into Local Authorities redundancy & age strategies, it turned out that on average 64% of all redundancies were forced onto the over 50s. What that meant was these local authorities lost most all of the people who had the knowledge and experience from the previous 30 years of boom and bust and lay offs to be able to better inform the future strategy of their organisations and handle the crisis management required. This resulted in a number of LAs having to re-hire some key older senior staff, but as consultants at a higher rate! Could it be that the apparent wholesale redundancies of similarly experienced older staff over the last year has contributed towards the current debacle. Let this be a lesson to employers, you need to retain your older, wiser and experienced staff as an age diverse workforce gives you higher productivity, more profitability and enhances staff morale
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