10 Our review has concluded that the Department has followed good practice in planning its headcount reduction to date. The Department has provided consistent central direction, allowing the detailed planning for military and civilians to evolve separately to consider different terms of employment. The first tranches of the military redundancy programme and civilian Voluntary Early Release Scheme have progressed without problems to date.
11 The Department has developed good models and tools that have helped it to profile the numbers of headcount cuts required, and the predicted savings. The assumptions underpinning these models need adjusting to reflect the actual cuts being made. This is not unexpected given the scale and complexity of the redundancy programmed and Voluntary Early Release Scheme and the difficulty of predicting who will apply to leave.
12 The Department has mixed information on its workforce. Good workforce information is essential for departments to make sensible decisions about which skills, in what quantity, and where, they must retain to deliver their strategic objectives effectively. The Department recognises this and, in response to previous shortfalls in data quality, is now generating better information on the numbers of civilian personnel. It already has good information for its military personnel.
13 The Department's information on civilian skills needs improving. While the Department has good information on the skills of its military workforce, its information about the skills of the civilian workforce is limited. The Department has recognised this might lead to the risk of it inadvertently losing skilled personnel. To address this risk, data on civilian skills is being gathered from applications to the Voluntary Early Release Scheme. This approach will however, only provide data in respect of an individual applicant's skills and not the entire civilian workforce, and then, only once the scheme is under way. Consequently, the Department will struggle to target its headcount reductions on the skills it most needs to keep.