MORE than 500 City of York Council staff have been made redundant over the past five years - about a fifth of them compulsorily, a new report has revealed.

A detailed review has shown when the axe has fallen year-by year since 2011, as the authority has tried to trim its costs in the face of repeated cuts in its central government grant.

A total of 520 jobs have been shed, of which exactly 100 have been compulsory redundancies, despite efforts by the council to shed jobs through other measures where possible, such as retirement, redeployment and voluntary redundancy.

It says that in the year April 2011 to March 2012, a total of 213 people lost their jobs, of whom 174 went voluntarily and 30 were made compulsorily redundant.

Between April 2012 and March 2013, there was another 105 redundancies, 13 of which were compulsory.

Another 76 people lost their jobs between April 2013 and March 2014, of whom 14 went compulsorily, and between April 2014 and March 2015, a further 83 went, of whom 21 were compulsory redundancies.

In the current year, from April 2015 to March 2016, another 43 jobs have been shed so far, 13 of whom have been made compulsorily redundant.

A detailed analysis of redundancies between April and December last year is being given to councillors but is exempt from being made public because it is considered confidential, because of the level of detail provided.

The report says all the redundancies made by the council have been subject to consultation, in accordance with the authority's statutory obligations.

It says managers were required to develop a redundancy business case for every redundancy but, by law, the decisions on whether or not to make an employee redundant rested with the chief executive or officers nominated by him.

A spokeswoman for the union Unison was unavailable for comment.