‘Rich’ National Trust condemned over cuts
THE National Trust is behaving like a “big conglomerate” by sacking nearly 1,300 staff including dozens of curators while sitting on cash reserves of more than £1.3 billion, a senior Tory MP has said.
Julian Knight, who chairs the digital, culture, media and sport select committee, said he would be writing to the Trust to justify the cuts it is making in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The news came after National Trust members attacked the board at Saturday’s annual meeting, asking why the Trust had not spent more of its £300 million of the £1.3 billion of “unrestricted reserves” to stem the job losses announced earlier this summer to help save £200 million.
Mr Knight told The Daily Telegraph: “They are incredibly rich. I was blown away when I looked at their reserves. Put it this way they could bail out a substantial proportion of the charity sector. ”
He said that the job cuts were “the sort of thing you expect from a big conglomerate making redundancies while still sitting on a huge cash pile.”
The Trust is already under fire over its report into the links between its properties, and slavery and colonialism with members accusing the Trust of pursuing a “woke agenda”. MPS are due to debate “the future of the National Trust” in the Commons tomorrow.
Mr Knight added: “Many members of the National Trust are clearly questioning whether the recent initiatives are truly about relevance and modernisation or potentially the sort of woke culture capture we are seeing in many parts of society.”
At Saturday’s annual general meeting National Trust members asked why the Trust had not spent more of its “unrestricted reserves” on its costs to stem the job losses. One member called Darren told the board: “This is a short term situation yet you are not prepared to stand by your employees and at the first sign of trouble you are laying them off.”
The Trust said that the effects of the pandemic had meant it was “forced to make 514 posts redundant, with 782 people taking voluntary redundancy”.
A Trust spokesman said last night: “We have used our unrestricted reserves to get us through the initial crisis but this isn’t a long-term solution.
“The vast majority of our funds are restricted, made up of donations given to us for specific conservation projects, in good faith. It is legally and morally wrong to spend them on the running of the organisation, including unrelated wages or redundancy costs.”