The United Kingdom’s official Central Office of Information has been forced to announce today a sizeable cut in their staff—trimming their payroll from 737 employees to 450. This appears to be the result of the government’s freeze on non-essential marketing, promotion, and advertisement expense. This has caused for considerably less to do in the COI offices, and thus little to no need for the office to employ 737 individuals.
The internal reconstructions results in a 40% staffing cut for the agency, a trading fund that operates without an independent budget, but instead handling work for various government and public sectors. In the last fiscal year, the government’s collective expense through COI was £531m, but this all equated to a relatively low profit. The income over the first half of 2010 is said to be down 52% from the previous 6 month period—and even worse is that coalition government fears this will do nothing by worsen as time goes on.
The COI will begin axing employees strategically. They will initially rid themselves of what they perceive to be redundancies, but admit that if this doesn’t equate the necessary cuts, they will resort to “redundancies on a compulsory basis.” To make sense of the situation, an official 90 day consultation will take place from now until November.COI Chief Executive Mark Lund says the body ‘has always adapted to meet the requirements of government and the changing media landscape’. He adds: ‘A leaner COI is in line with new government priorities. Our future will be grounded in continuing to deliver excellent communications to achieve government aims, in the most cost efficient and effective way possible.’
The Chief Executive of COI, Mark Lund claims that the body has “always adapted to meet the requirements of government and the changing media landscape…A leaner COI is in line with new government priorities. Our future will be grounded in continuing to deliver excellent communications to achieve government aims, in the most cost efficient and effective way possible.”
The department was established on 1st April 1946 to replace what then was then the Ministry of Information—a wartime utility. It has been responsible for relatively well known slogans and market hooks, see “Coughs and sneezes cause diseases.”
To research it further, the official website cane be found at www.coi.gov.uk .
