Cutting Jobs at ACE
Although obviously the loss of any jobs is a blow to the people concerned and to the economy in general, I doubt that there’ll be universal weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the proposals to unite all of ACE’s support services in one place with the possible loss of twenty jobs (as we report today), instead of duplicating these services all over the country.
The saving of around £800,000 is significant: it’s a considerable sum and will be able to fund quite a number of projects and goes a little - a very little - way towards making up for the loss of the £35m which the government is stealing for the Olympics.
It also makes sense for finance, grant management, IT, human resources, office services and customer enquiries departments (all of which are affected and currently employ 160 people throughout England) to provide a central service to all local offices rather than reduplicate facilities in every region.
But it also makes me - who am, it has to be said, management-phobic - breath a small sigh of relief - assuming, of course, that the new support services department is capable of a swift response to local needs. Proper management is necessary - of course it is, he tells himself - but a large management/admin department brings with it its own inertia and a tendency to regard its own procedures as more important than the things they are in place to support. As, for example, in education the filling in of the correct forms is becoming more important than what happens in the class room.
£800,000? That’s 160 small (i.e. £5,000 or less) grants for the arts projects - 17.7 projects for every one of ACE’s regional offices.
Mind you the loss of the £35m to the Olympics means the loss of 7,000 small projects, so we still need to make the government aware of our anger at the loss of all this funding. So sign the petition now - http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/lotteryolympics/ - and write to your MP!