Royal Voluntary Service (RVS) is planning to make up to 144 redundancies in both its operations and support services teams as part of a restructure.

The older people’s charity, which dropped the word “women” from its name last year to reach more men, currently employs around 570 full time staff and 1,150 part time staff and wants to reduce its running costs and focus more of its resources on supporting volunteers.

RVS also plans to invest the running of its retail outlets and increase the income it gets from these activities.

David McCullough, chief executive of RVS, said: “There is a growing recognition that the voluntary sector will need to play a greater role in caring for older people in the community and giving them the personal, tailored support they deserve.

“We recognise that and know we will need to scale up our services in the most sustainable way. For us this means reducing our running costs while empowering our volunteers on the front line.”

He added that this would mean “some job losses” and that the charity is discussing proposals with affected employees.

A spokeswoman told Civil Society News that the charity was not in able to reveal how many jobs will go until it has finished consulting with staff.

She added: “We will be doing everything we can to reduce and avoid job losses, and to support our employees at this difficult time but we have come to realise that these changes are necessary to get the charity into the right shape.”

The charity has been operating at a deficit for the last five years and last year spent £4m more than it received, with an income of £73m and expenditure of £77m. Its income has also fallen each year since 2008, when it was £83m.

Its most recent financial report for the year ending March 2013 show that its total staff costs were £23m, with 16 members of staff earning more than £60,000.