Homelessness charity Centrepoint is consulting with staff on a possible 14 redundancies, with others to see their contracted hours increased to 37.5 a week.

The charity met with union officials last week, and is due to meet them again tomorrow to discuss the changes, which a spokesman said are “necessary to continue its commitment to delivering high quality outcome-focussed and person-centred support to vulnerable young people”.

Matt Smith, regional industrial officer at the trade union Unite, told civilsociety.co.uk that the proposal had originally been for 34 job losses and a 40-hour week, but these had been negotiated down.

In total around 100 staff members would be affected by the proposals.

He said staff are “very angry” about the changes, and that there was a perception that frontline workers are being forced to take the painful funding cuts while senior management are not.

“At the moment there’s a bit of an impasse in regards to the scope of the consultation; we want to make sure that there’s a complete redistribution of any pain to mitigate any possible redundancies for our members, and Centrepoint’s position is that this consultation is purely about the frontline services.

"Tomorrow we’re going to go through more of their financial documents, where they’re confident they’re going to be able to convince us that it has to be this way."

He added that the senior management is arguing that it had already restructured to save money and frontline staff are not necessarily aware of it.

Undercut on contracts

On the charity’s financial situation, Smith said: “It’s not Centrepoint’s fault but it's certainly not our members' fault. It seems the people giving out the contracts are doing it on the basis of value and the minimum amount of quality, and organisations that are iconic like Centrepoint, and are known for giving a quality service, are being undercut.”

The spokesman for Centrepoint added: “It would not be appropriate to discuss further the proposed changes at this stage as our first priority in this instance is to our staff and the young people they support.”