St John Ambulance (SJA) is planning to downsize with 10% of its workforce affected as it faces financial challenges in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the charity has said.
During the pandemic, SJA provided a lot of support around the country’s vaccination rollout, for which it received funding from government.
But the charity has since experienced a decline in demand for its workplace first aid training courses, which had predominantly supported its overall finances, negatively impacting its income.
Year on year, it is forecasting a £5m drop in income. The charity said: “Although we made some provision in our forecasts, we did not anticipate the level of turbulence we have seen in demand for training, including as workplaces readjust to new post-Covid ways of working (with the significant rise of people working from home for at least part of the working week).”
It added that as a result of a weaker economic and operating environment for the sector, and the sustained pressures on income generation following the pandemic, SJA will be reducing its size and that the change will impact around 10% of employees.
The charity’s 2022 accounts show the average number of persons employed in the year was 1,473, making 10% around 147 people.
A SJA spokesperson told Civil Society said: “We are doing everything we can to support colleagues at this unsettling time and we are engaging widely with them to inform our approach and help shape the future of the charity. We anticipate change will impact around 10% of employees.
“Through people moving on in the normal course of their career, those seeking voluntary release and retraining people, we hope that our transformation programme will negatively impact as few people as possible.
“We will also continue to take wider mitigating measures to help us reduce costs – through ways of working, reducing waste and considering changes to help us become more efficient in the long term.”
SJA also outlined its refreshed vision which will focus on community first aid.
‘Transformation will mean changes for some of our people’
Income at the charity was £120m in the 2022 calendar year, compared to £114m in 2021 and £92m in 2020.
Some £52m of its income last year came from first aid training.
A statement from the charity read: “The world has changed so much, including extraordinary inflationary pressures, that we have not yet seen our previous financial operating model restored to full strength.
“Trustees, supported by the charity’s management, are therefore taking the necessary steps to protect the future of the charity by operating on the basis that the current position will continue to apply for the medium term.
“Meeting the opportunity of a community-focused future in the context of our current financial position means a transformation is required to protect the quality in delivery expected of us by all those we serve.
“That includes reducing the size of the organisation in line with income forecasts, creating what we believe will be, through the input and expertise of St John people, a more scalable model for delivering our refreshed focus on enabling community first aid.”
It added that the transformation “will mean changes for some of our people” but said it would “seek to minimise the impact as much as possible, including through considering wider changes to our ways of working”.
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