Medical charity St John Ambulance (SJA) has reported a more than £16m deficit and has started to make redundancies as part of a major restructure.
The charity’s overall income fell by 10% last year to £108m, its recently filed financial documents show, with expenditure rising by 3% to £124m.
In its accounts for 2023, the charity said it experienced a greater and “longer than expected” drop in income from its first aid training services, down from £52.0m to £43.3m.
Meanwhile, it reported energy and fuel costs at “higher levels than had been budgeted for” as well as increased staffing and a “cost-of-living salary increase”, with employee costs increasing overall by 13% to £59.0m.
Last year, the charity announced plans to downsize by around 10% and its new accounts say that it began a programme of central cost reduction “including a redundancy programme and voluntary redundancy scheme in our central functions leading to departures in late 2023 and into 2024”.
SJA paid £1.9m in employee termination costs in 2023, compared to nil the year before.
However, the charity’s average monthly number of full-time employees was 1,493 last year, compared to 1,473 the year before.
Plan to rebuild finances
SJA’s total funds, meanwhile, declined by 14% to £99.5m.
“Over time, our determination to serve communities to the best of our abilities, investing in our clinical practice and digital platforms with small repeated deficits, had left our reserves depleted,” the accounts read.
“Our organisation had also become overly complex and the experience we provided for people within the organisation, employed and volunteer had become disempowering with reduced local autonomy closest to our direct impact.”
The charity said it aimed to break even by the end of 2025 and had implemented tighter controls to reduce expenditure and deferred planned capital expenditure on system, fleet and property improvements.
SJA plans to restructure locally in 2024 after speaking to volunteers about how it might better organise itself.
It is also reviewing its property needs and assessing how it might reduce ongoing maintenance costs.
Last month, the charity appointed senior civil servant Shona Dunn as its next permanent chief executive, taking over from interim leader Ben Freeman in September.
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