Since 1999 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has made one permanent member of staff compulsorily redundant in 2012. Payments equivalent to statutory redundancy have been made to two non-permanent members of staff who were appointed on fixed-term contracts and entitled to a redundancy payment following the expiry of their contracts. The total cost of these payments was £22,479.57. The FCO only runs exit schemes in accordance with the Civil Service Compensation Scheme. All schemes run across the civil service and are approved by the Cabinet Office.

In addition, the FCO has run a range of voluntary early exit schemes (VES) since 1999. The current scheme has been in existence since December 2010.

In 2010-11, 131 staff left the FCO, at a cost of £15.3 million. 118 of these left under old exit schemes.

In 2011-12, 89 staff left the FCO, at a cost of £5.3 million.

Although we ran early exit schemes in previous years these used different rules and we do not have comparable data for this period. It would incur disproportionate costs to search individual files to determine exact numbers and cost.

Since 1999, no staff have been made compulsorily redundant in the following executive agencies and arm’s length bodies (ALBs) of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office:

FCO Services;

Wilton Park;

Great Britain China Centre.

The British Council has made 56 staff compulsorily redundant since 1999. The cost of redundancy payments made in 2010-11 and 2011-12 was £563,014 and £28,633 respectively. No costs are available prior to this date as the information was not recorded centrally. To collate the information now, from individual records, would incur disproportionate cost.

The Westminster Foundation for Democracy has made three staff compulsorily redundant since 1999; two staff in 2007-08 and the Chief Executive Officer in 2009. The total cost of redundancy payments was £215,761.