BOLTON College chiefs are preparing to pay back at least £1.5 million - after claiming money for students they did not have for around four years.

Governors at the Manchester Road College are set to repay the first instalment of the money to the Further Education Funding Council after admitting a bureaucratic blunder.

But trade union leaders who organised a demonstration yesterday claim their members are being made to pay the price of the "incompetence and intransigence" which they say led to the "fiasco".

They claim up to 40 jobs will be axed next year as finance bosses struggle to repay the first £500,000 of the debt. And union chiefs claim the actual total is nearer to £2 million.

College chiefs say a genuine mistake in their record collecting procedures led to the £1.5 million overpayment by the Funding Council over about four years but insist the systems have now been tightened up by external auditors.

Further education colleges get paid more for students who finish the course and the Manchester Road records system failed to flag up those who left part way through.

The BEN understands the college is planning to pay back the money at a rate of £500,000 per year but unions claim college bosses could save the doomed jobs by negotiating a new deal, spreading smaller repayments over a longer period. Yesterday UNISON, NATFE, PAT and the GMB unions held a joint demonstration at the Manchester Road site and later today they will meet college management to discuss the potential job losses.

UNISON regional officer Jim Moodie said: "Over the past five years the College had been over-claiming for students and has been overpaid by the national central funding body to the tune of over £2 million.

"To pay part of this back the College is about to make up to 40 compulsory redundancies this coming year.

"UNISON believes the fault lies securely with the management and their continued presence gives the employees no confidence that they can turn the matter around.

"The College has a fine reputation but the present actions and recent track record of the college management is not good enough."

But chairman of the governors, Cllr Cliff Morris, denied that the job losses had anything to do with the impending first instalment of the repayment and accused union leaders of trying to "muddy the waters".

He said: "The FEFC are entitled to their money back but this has nothing to do with the redundancies.

"It is all about having the right number of staff for the number of students. If we do not have the students, we cannot pay people to sit around doing nothing. We have to make the college viable and this is what we intend to do.

"We are about the last college in the country to introduce redundancy procedures and the numbers will be nowhere near what the unions are quoting.

"We cannot rule out compulsory redundancies but we are hoping that most of job losses will come through voluntary early retirement or the non-replacement policy."

An FEFC spokesman said: "We do not know the exact figures yet but we understand the college is putting together a recovery plan.

"We do not have a remit for personnel and staffing issues. Our main duty is to ensure the proper use of public funds and sufficient further education provision in an area.

"If a college has wrongly claimed funds it has to pay it back while maintaining adequate FE provision for local people."

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