Macmillan Cancer Support plans to cut 150 roles from its workforce after conducting a major strategic review, it has confirmed following reports in the Guardian.
The charity said it had “felt the impact of a difficult financial environment” and that the job losses would be organisation-wide.
“It is getting harder to raise money, and inflation means it costs more to do the same as we did a few years ago,” a Macmillan spokesperson said.
“We are tackling these challenges by transforming, so we can have more impact for people with cancer, but without relying on raising more money to be able to do that.
“This has meant taking the difficult decision to reduce the size of the organisation and sadly means we must make some valued colleagues redundant.
“We are taking these difficult decisions, and building a new strategy to ensure Macmillan is in the best possible position to provide the vital support people living with cancer need now and long into the future.”
A spokesperson told the Guardian that staff providing advice and support directly to the public would not be made redundant and that it aimed to “minimise the impact” on its beneficiaries.
The charity’s employee numbers have fluctuated in recent years, declining from 1,810 full-time equivalent staff in the year to March 2019 to 1,527 in 2020-21 before rising to 1,687 last year.
Strategy planned to ‘drive cultural change’
Macmillan CEO Gemma Peters joined the charity in January 2023.
Speaking to Civil Society last year, she said the charity was working on a strategy to move away “from doing things for people living with cancer and instead towards working in equal partnership with them”.
“I wanted to use the strategy process as a way of driving some of the cultural change I want to see in the organisation,” she said.
“So, much more co-design and development with people with cancer.”
She also said that because Macmillan had “evolved organically over quite a long period of time, it can be quite clunky, siloed and a bit too hierarchical”.
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