UP TO 2,000 jobs could be lost at Cornwall Council in an attempt to make savings of £110-million over the next four years.

The council, which employs 13,550 full-time staff, will be announcing its emergency budget in November.

Council leader Alec Robertson said: Pay and wages make up around half of the councils budget so there will inevitably be job losses.

We appreciate that this will be a very difficult time for our staff but the truth is there is no easy solution.

We know that we have some very difficult decisions to make but delaying these decisions will now have a much more severe impact on jobs and services in the future.

At a recent council briefing, areas of savings were identified including reducing the number of buildings used by the council and integrating contracts in areas such as waste where there are currently six separate companies collecting refuse.

The council said it hoped to make most of the cuts over the next 12 months and save £17-million by April.

At the briefing councillors also voted against a 2.3% increase in their daily allowances and opted to freeze their expenses.

At this months meeting of Callington Town Council, members said devolvement of some of the services to parish and town councils would save money.

It was also suggested that volunteers from the community could be utilised to do things such as cut verges outside their houses.

Cllr Jeremy Gist said unfortunately health and safety legislation had hampered this kind of thing.

You now have to have a street works licence and go on a training course if you want to cut the verges.

It used to be that health and safety legislation was there to protect people but it has got to the point that it now stops anyone from doing anything, said Cllr Gist.

Members of the public had been complaining about the weeds growing outside a vacant shop premises in the town and Mr Gist said the council could no longer use weedkiller because of cases where people had sued the authority for such things as the loss of a plant which was important to them.