Tate to cut 120 gallery jobs in £4.8m cost-cutting drive

Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

Tate is cutting 120 roles among its gallery staff as part of a £4.8m cost-cutting exercise that it says is vital for its survival because of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

It is the second large-scale redundancy programme the organisation has embarked on since it closed its doors in March. Tate previously announced it was cutting half of its staff at Tate Ltd, its commercial arm.

“We now need to do what so many others in our sector are doing, which is to reduce the overall size of Tate Gallery’s workforce,” it said in a statement. “We hope that this voluntary process will help us make these significant savings, but we cannot rule out having to move to compulsory redundancy in 2021 to meet the necessary level of reductions.”

The statement from Tate’s director, Maria Balshaw, and its chief operating officer, Vicky Cheetham, said there needed to be a 12% reduction in staff, equating to around 120 full-time roles.

Tate faced protests when it announced the 313 redundancies across its commercial enterprises, with unions saying the move would disproportionately affect black and minority ethnic staff, contradicting its promise in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests to diversify its staff.

In September an open letter signed by more than 300 artists, including several former Turner prize winners, supported a strike by Tate workers and demanded the organisation use 10% of the £7m support it had received from the government to save jobs.

Tate said visitor figures were expected to reach around 1 million this year, instead of the 8 million it had predicted before the pandemic. “For every £10 we were expecting to make this year, we are only receiving £4, and we expect to lose £56m in self-generated income overall,” the statement said.

Helen Legg, the director of Tate Liverpool, told the Daily Telegraph that the loss of income across the Tate group would have a long-term impact. “We won’t see a bounceback in our figures in the next 12 months, maybe even the next two years. This is about survival,” she said.

The Tate statement said: “Reducing the size of our workforce is a course of action we take with huge reluctance. The knowledge, experience and passion of our colleagues across Tate is at the heart of our success and is hugely valued. We nevertheless have no choice given the impact of the pandemic on our finances.”