Deloitte cuts 250 underperforming staff in the UK

Deloitte has axed about 250 employees in the UK in at least the third round of redundancies at the Big Four accountancy in the past 13 months.
The move affects about 1 per cent of Deloitte’s UK workforce and is thought to target employees within the advisory division who are seen as under-performing.
A source said the cuts were part of a “performance management” process and that those affected had “received appropriate payments for notice”.
Deloitte warned in September last year that it was planning on making 800 employees redundant because of a slowdown in demand after significant growth during the pandemic.
All of the Big Four accountancy firms, which also includes EY, KPMG and PwC, hired aggressively during the Covid-19 pandemic because of a sharp rise in deals and demand for their services and are now looking to cut costs as the industry faces more challenging market conditions.
EY cut about 300 jobs last year, PwC launched a round of layoffs this summer, and KPMG axed more than 200 roles at the end of last year while freezing pay for 12,000 of its 17,000 UK staff.
Deloitte’s latest layoffs come less than a month after it announced that its 749 UK equity partners took home more than £1 million on average for the fourth year in a row. The average figure was a 5 per cent fall compared with the previous year, though the number of partners at Deloitte has risen since then from 714 to 749. The accountancy firm is the only member of the Big Four to report an average payout in excess of £1 million for the past two years.
The company is also in the process of overhauling its operations in the UK as part of a global reorganisation, where the accountancy firm is shrinking the number of its main business units to four from the five it has had for the past decade. The new units will be audit and assurance; strategy, risk and transactions; technology and transformation; and tax and legal.
Deloitte declined to comment.