Retrenchment in the Public Sector

The business news is full of stories covering the retrenchment strategies of various private sector firms such as Nokia, Sony, Thorntons, HP and others.The large job losses involved generate lots of headlines and in-depth analysis of whether the retrenchment strategy will work. We’ve been tracking some of these stories for students using our ResearchBuster on Retrenchment.

However, students need to be aware that retrenchment strategies are not just reserved for the private sector. Public sector organisations have been affected just as much by decisions to reduce and change the scope of operations and activities. Here are a few useful research examples to add to student notes.

6,000 jobs go at the BBC

A long-term change programme at the BBC resulted in at least 6,000 job losses at a cost of £277m according to this research in the Guardian. These job losses related to two major money-saving initiatives – the Value for Money and Continuous Improvement programmes. Thousands of further job losses are expected to arise as a result of a new change programme called “Delivering Quality First”

The BBC responded to the disclosure of the redundancy costs as follows:

“the BBC has made significant reductions in its headcount as part of overall efficiency savings. While this has necessitated some one-off redundancy costs, this is outweighed by the cumulative savings achieved over this period of £2.7 billion.’

Ministry of Defence

Almost 7,000 job losses have recently been announced by the MoD as part of a major redundancy programme.

Under the terms of the Strategic Defence and Security Review, announced in 2010, the navy and the RAF each had to cut 5,000 jobs by 2015, the Army 7,000 and the Ministry of Defence 25,000 civilian staff, making a total loss of at least 37,000 jobs.