More than one in nine Westminster Council staff face job losses
Westminster City Council's Cabinet has approved a major transformation programme expected to save £45 million over three years through workforce reforms including employee reorganisations, commercial reforms, and digital innovation.
The Fit for the Future
programme, approved at a Cabinet meeting on Monday 2 November 2026, will involve significant changes to the council's workforce, commercial operations, and digital services. The initiative aims to address substantial financial pressures and increasing demand for services.
Workforce changes within the programme will be delivered in phases between November 2026 and December 2027. The programme is projected to deliver £45 million in savings over three years.
The programme is structured around three key workstreams:
- Strengthening Westminster: This aims to deliver £29 million in savings by redesigning services, improving organisational structure, and increasing productivity. It is anticipated that approximately 420 posts may be reduced as part of this stream. These reductions are expected to be proportionately greater at senior leadership levels than at lower-paid grades, representing about 11.75% of the workforce. The 'Strengthening Westminster' workstream will deliver savings through organisational and service redesign, clearer alignment of functions, simpler and more consistent processes, more effective corporate and business support, and improved customer experience. It aims to create a more agile and productive organisation by using innovation, digital tools, and automation to simplify processes, reduce duplication, and align capacity with the council's priorities.
- Optimising Westminster: This workstream targets a minimum of £15.8 million in savings through enhanced commercial acumen, better contract management, procurement, income generation, and asset utilisation. This includes reviewing major, mid-value, and lower-value contracts, optimising income from fees and charges, reducing off-contract expenditure, and improving the use of the council's assets and estate.
- Reimagining Westminster: This focuses on prevention and place-based working to improve outcomes and reduce demand for high-cost services, with an expected saving of £0.2 million from voluntary and community sector transformation.
An initial programme investment of £4 million has been allocated for establishing the programme's infrastructure and delivery capability. Redundancy costs are estimated at approximately £10 million. The estimated redundancy costs will be partially covered by £5.2 million in existing reserves, requiring an additional £5 million in one-off funding. This estimate will be refined as proposals develop and consultation outcomes become clearer.
The council will retain accessible human support where residents need it, ensuring that digital innovation does not negatively impact service accessibility for vulnerable residents. Priority activity in Housing, for example, will focus on using technology to enable redesigned services while retaining accessible human support.
The 'Fit for the Future' programme will track performance through delivery of savings and benefits against profile, workforce productivity, capability, and organisational effectiveness, resident experience and satisfaction, commercial performance and value for money, digital adoption and service modernisation, demand reduction and prevention outcomes, and programme milestones and delivery confidence.