EVERY senior officer at a cash-strapped council will have to apply for their own jobs as part of a major shake-up.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council plans to save £1.3 million by getting rid of 14 of its most senior officials and axing two of its six directorates.

The restructure would leave the authority with two fewer directors, saving an estimated £246,000, and cut the number of heads of department from 31 to 19, to save almost £1.1 million a year.

It is part of a cost-cutting drive to save £30 million over the next two years.

But papers leaked to The Sentinel reveal that all 37 staff in the authority's top two salary bands would have to submit applications to keep their posts.

Council chief executive John van de Laarschot, who will not be affected by the management purge, told staff in a memo: "All staff at tiers one and two will be required to complete a job skills and competency template and an online personality profile.

"These will be forwarded by human resources during the first and second weeks of September.

"Meetings with the human resources committee are scheduled in September to assess them and to confirm placed appointments."

But Mr van de Laarschot said where more than one officer had applied for the same post, the candidates will have to go through a full interview process to fill the vacancy.

No applications will be accepted for the posts from outside the council, unless they remain unfilled due to a lack of suitable internal applicants.

The papers also show staff have been invited to register an interest in early retirement if they do not wish to go through the application process.

Any officers who fail to secure a post will be earmarked for redundancy, unless they can be redeployed to a less senior role elsewhere in the organisation.

The papers also reveal that some senior staff have been paid extra to oversee aspects of the transformation programme, sparking complaints from those who were overlooked for the roles.

The 10 staff were supposed to revert to their normal pay but the chief executive said: "This never happened and has caused great concern to other staff not on the transformation scale, and it now appears to be unfair, inappropriate and unsuitable."

"It is therefore proposed to delete the salary scale to offer consistency and fairness."

The consultation document shows that officers have until Wednesday to submit their job applications, and the successful staff will be notified on October 1.

Any redundancies will be made on December 31, in readiness for the new structure taking effect on January 4.

Community Voice Councillor Mick Salih said he supported the policy of reducing the number of staff on high salaries.

But he is concerned that the process may cause instability at the highest levels of the authority.

He said: "I have got no problem with reducing the number of senior staff, providing there is a suitable structure in place at the end of the process.

"But these proposals don't really give us very much detail about the underlying structure within these departments."