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Ministry of Defence: Redundancy

Volume 715: debated on Monday 7 December 2009

Question

Asked by

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many people were made redundant by the Ministry of Defence and its agencies in each of the last three years for which figures are available; and what the associated costs were in each year. [HL70]

The information on costs that has been requested is not held centrally and could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

Departmental records do not differentiate between voluntary and compulsory redundancies. The over- whelming majority of redundancies are achieved through voluntary means and the table below gives the numbers of all redundancies over the past three financial years:

2006-07

2007-08

2008-09

Total of voluntary and compulsory redundancies

2,035

2,560

1,365

Although in-year costs for redundancy payments are recorded, such costs do not reflect the number of redundancies actually made in the same year. This is because redundancy costs, especially where the compensation takes the form of the early payment of pension, may be spread over a number of years. Consequently, the costs recorded in any one year may reflect in large part redundancy activity from earlier years.