The Environment Agency has confirmed it will make almost 15% of its staff redundant over the next 12 months, after its funding was cut by £33.5 million.
In his 2013 budget, the Chancellor announced that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) budget would be slashed by 9.6%, leaving them with £100 million less to spend next year. With funding on flood management and protection ringfenced, savings were required in other areas and the Treasury confirmed that it expects Defra's bodies, like the Agency, to save £54 million through "better joint working".
A spokesperson for the Agency commented, "Our budget for 2014/15 will be confirmed shortly. However, we are likely to reduce staff numbers to around 9,700 by October 2014. We will then aim to keep numbers broadly at that level through to March 2015, dependent of course on future funding. We will only achieve this by looking across the whole organisation at our ways of working and structures".
The Agency's Chair, Lord Chris Smith and its Chief Executive wrote a separate communication to employees earlier in the month, which read, "We have to balance our continuing ambitions for people and the environment with the knowledge that we will have significantly reduced funding for many important areas of our work. We will need to look for efficiencies at all levels of the Environment Agency, as we seek to protect our environmental outcomes. We know that we are likely to be a smaller organisation in the future".
Along with considering whether work delivered at a regional level could be provided at a local or national level, the Agency is also weighing up the possibility of outsourcing its HR and finance functions to a private sector firm as part of a Cabinet Office initiative for public sector bodies to share service providers.
