Action for Children made 118 staff redundant in 2012 after restructuring its services to reduce its management costs and meet the increasing demand for support.
Its annual accounts for the year ended March 2013 show that the overall number of staff employed by the charity fell by 548 – from 5,468 in 2012 to 4,920 in 2013. The number of people earning above £60,000 also fell from 38 to 26. While some of this was as a result of contracts coming to an end, the charity confirmed that throughout 2012 it had carried out a restructuring which had resulted in 118 redundancies.
Nic Allen, director of HR, said: “Action for Children is in a strong position to provide effective and flexible services, to meet the increased need for our community-based support services which we’re currently seeing from some of the most vulnerable children, young people and families in society.
“This is because we have adapted to the challenging economic climate that we, and other charities, faced in 2012.”
He explained that: “Following a staff consultation on how we should improve the delivery and management of our services, Action for Children restructured its services, which reduced our management costs and improved the way we work. Frontline services were unaffected.”
The accounts show that the total staff costs in 2013 were £5.5m less than in 2012.
Earlier this year civilsociety.co.uk reported on the restructure of Action for Children’s executive leadership team which saw the number of executive directors reduced from four to three.
Income down £18m
The charity’s total income for the 2012/13 financial year was £180m – down from £198m last year, with the charity seeing a drop in voluntary income and income from charitable activities.
The accounts note that: “Fundraising had a difficult year. The target to grow donated income was not achieved, with income down 10 per cent as the success of events in previous years could not be repeated, although legacy income was up.”
Expenditure also fell from £184m to £172m – a drop of £12m - with the savings in staff costs accounting for about half of this.
