Cabe chief executive Richard Simmons is taking a £20,000 pay cut as the design watchdog waits to find out how much more money it will be asked to slash from its budget this year.
According to Cabe’s latest annual report, out today, Simmons picked up between £125,000 and £130,000 last year – a drop of nearly 5% on his 2008 salary.
Simmons has agreed to take a further voluntary cut of around 15%, which works out at just under £20,000 on his previous salary.
The rest of the of the senior management board, who between them picked up £465,000 in 2009, are having their pay frozen – although none are taking a pay cut.
Cabe has already been hit with £138,600 in cuts this year by one of its two funders, the Department for Culture Media & Sport, and is due to find out how much money it will be asked to save from its Communities & Local Government budget by the end of the month.
“We’ve made our case and now it’s just a case of waiting,” said Simmons who admitted the cut will be more than the 10.5% it has already been asked to make (see box).
The two departments provide nearly all of Cabe’s annual funding and both have been ordered to make across-the-board savings of 25-30% by the Treasury from next April.
Simmons admitted its budget over the coming four-year funding period could be cut by even more, but he told BD it would be able to ride out the storm.
“We know we’ll have the hit,” he said. “We’ve been asked to make cuts before so we’re used to being flexible.”
He refused to be drawn on whether the watchdog would have to cut its 125-strong staff as a result, but admitted: “There will be consequences [of the cuts]. We will look at how much we get [after October] and then ask are we the right size and do we have the right number of staff?”
Simmons said Cabe would still be able to function on the kind of cuts coming in the autumn but denied the watchdog was overstaffed.
“It doesn’t have too many people working for it,” he said. “”We are the size we are because we’ve been asked to be this size. We have certain jobs to do.
“Cabe is very cost effective and is fantastically useful.”
What this year’s cuts mean
Cabe receives around 95% of its funding from the government via CLG and DCMS.
Its latest round of funding, which has been spread over a three year period, runs out next March. It will be told how much money it is getting for the next four years in this autumn’s spending review due out on October 20.
This is what it has received in the past three years:
Year CLG (£m) DCMS (£m) TOTAL
08/09 6.94 4.69 11.63
09/10 6.94 4.69 11.63
10/11* 6.69 4.62 11.31
TOTAL 20.57 14 34.57
As part of chancellor George Osborne’s £6 billion austerity cuts announced in June ahead of his emergency Budget, Cabe was asked to save 3% from its DCMS funding in this financial year which works out at £138,600.
It is also being asked to cut at least 10.5% from its CLG budget during the same period, a saving of £702,450.
The two figures add up to a total of £841,050 in savings – or 7.4% - out of its £11.31 million budget this year.
Simmons said the CLG saving would be more than 10.5% but “not as high as [the] 25-30%” it would have cut from its budget over the next four years.
As a guide, if CLG asks Cabe to make a cut of 15% it will be asked to save just over £1 million from this year’s budget which, together with the DCMS saving, adds up to a total of £1.1 million.
If Cabe had been asked to cut 30% cut from its current budget, it had would have received £10.4 million less in the three year period between 2008 and 2011.
4 Readers' comments