National Trust branded ‘hard-nosed’ over plans for job cuts and closures
The country’s biggest conservation charity has been branded “harsh” and “hard-nosed” by the Scottish Government after planning to cut more than 400 jobs and close many of its sites in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
Culture secretary Fiona Hyslop described requests for “significant” financial help from the National Trust for Scotland as untenable given the scale of its cuts.
Giving evidence to Holyrood’s culture committee, she said it would be “unhelpful” for the tourism industry if NTS, which is proposing to cut 429 jobs from its 751-strong workforce, kept many of its sites closed when lockdown restrictions are eased.
The charity last week revealed it was facing a £28 million loss due to the impact of the lockdown. Just 27 of its 130 properties are expected to open to the public this year, with a further 18 due to reopen in 2021.
Ms Hyslop said she was “not impressed” at how NTS had gone about cutting its costs and called for a rethink which would have the support of its workforce and the public.
She said: “They’ve taken a very harsh approach to tackling this issue. They’re issuing notices of redundancy to not just some staff, but more than 400 staff, which is a really significant move.
“They’ve got particular challenges because they are a charity. Everybody is facing hardship in these difficult times. I understand that. But we also expect national institutions to provide leadership.
“Sometimes, if you’re such a big organisation and are so important to Scotland, your duty and responsibility is not just to the bottom line of the accounts - it’s to our heritage and our people, whether they are visitors or staff. “When we get to the stage that we want to welcome people back to Scotland we want to welcome them back to places that can provide them with a breadth of scenery and experience.
“If we open our tourism sector without places for people to go because they are closed that would not be helpful at all. I just don’t think they’ve thought about trying to take people with then. They’re trying to be quite hard-nosed about what they’re doing.”
A spokesman for NTS said: “These are steps we never wanted to take, reacting to a situation that is not of our making.
“As an independent charity, we have had to urgently apply the only options that are open to us in the face of property closures and loss of income, including reductions in spending, cancelling or postponing projects, seeking donations and, regrettably, proposing redundancies. “