MORE job losses are on the cards at West Somerset Council as the authority tries to save money by stripping back services to the bare minimum.

But the move comes with a pledge that, if spare money is available, additional discretionary services will be built back in to the council's plans.

Currently, council bosses are investigating the basic cost of running the authority by only providing statutory services.

Once that figure is known - and the staff numbers needed to deliver those services are confirmed - the council will then look at factoring additional, non-statutory services back into the equation.

Cllr Kate Kravis, the lead member for finance, told Monday's scrutiny committee meeting the authority was facing radical times that called for radical measures.

"We need to establish the minimum staff capacity for this council to be a viable unit of local government.

"Once we have that figure we can start building back in discretionary services, but those will need to be discussed and prioritised.

"We will protect frontline services, but we have to be realistic and there will be staff redundancies," Cllr Kravis said.

The council is currently facing a £1.7 million budget shortfall in the next three years and has already made hundreds of thousands of pounds of savings in this year alone.

In 2006, the council had the equivalent of 146 full-time staff. Now, five years later, that figure has dropped to just over 83 and looks set to fall even further.

Committee vice-chairman Cllr Richard Lillis said staff were the greatest asset of any company and warned: "We are going to have the most well-oiled motor car, but no-one is going to be available to drive it.

"You can't keep going down the staff cuts route. If you do, the machine just won't work."

But Cllr Kravis said it was not simply a case of cutting jobs, it was about the council cutting its cloth financially: "We can't carry on doing all that we do with the same staff.

"This is about what we can afford to do and staff structure we need to build up around that," she said.

Chief executive Adrian Dyer said the review was at stage four of an anticipated nine-stage process and said that while many services were not statutory, they were still vital - including website maintenance and the payment of staff wages.

"After we get to stage five we get to the point where we can conclude what it will cost us to deliver a viable unit of local government - the statutory services and the discretionary services which are deemed necessary.

"The number of staff we employ will depend on what services you, as councillors, think can be dropped," Mr Dyer said.

The council's budget gap has been blamed on a low Council Tax base and poor grant settlements from central Government.