2.15 The Department has taken steps to try to protect key skills in its civilian workforce with a selection panel assessing applications using five criteria which have been weighted according to importance:
• Skills value to the Department (weighted 5)
• Skills value to the business area (weighted 4)
• Cost (weighted 4)
• Proposed date of departure (weighted 3)
• Location (weighted 1)8
The Department has stipulated a small number of specific skills that cannot be released under the Scheme. The Department has not yet determined how headcount reductions will fall in individual business areas, which means that the current release of staff is not strategically targeted to protect critical areas.
2.16 The military are also seeking to protect skills and have excluded from the redundancy programme key trades based on operational demand or existing shortages. For example, the RAF excluded trained pilots, the Royal Navy excluded submariners and the Army excluded bomb disposal experts. Its redundancy programme has specific criteria on the ranks and trades that are, and are not, eligible for redundancy. This process allows the Armed Forces to target redundancies to surplus areas and ranks created partly by retiring equipment and closing bases, while protecting critical skills. For the first redundancy tranche, the Armed Forces also excluded the following non-applicants:9
Those receiving the operational allowance on the notifcation date (includes Afghanistan and Libya).
Those preparing for operations.
Those returning from operations.
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8 The criteria for the second civilian tranche have been altered slightly to include performance.
9 Non-applicants are military personnel who are selected for compulsory redundancy.