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Deloitte is planning to cut 180 more jobs across its UK advisory divisions, the latest sign of weakness in the British consulting industry.
The Big Four firm informed affected staff on Tuesday morning that their jobs were at risk in a restructuring which it said was necessary to navigate “challenging market conditions”, according to people familiar with the move.
The cuts come on top of 800 redundancies announced in September 2023 and 100 more in February this year. The firm has also been pushing out workers who it deems to be underperforming, including around 250 advisory staff this autumn, the Financial Times reported last month.
The latest job cuts will affect staff in both the strategy, risk and transactions division and the technology and transformation division, according to people familiar with the move. The job losses were still subject to consultation, they said, and added up to less than 1 per cent of Deloitte’s UK workforce.
Richard Houston, Deloitte’s UK senior partner and chief executive, warned in September that the firm had to “carefully consider our cost base and make some difficult choices this year”.
He was speaking after the firm announced that its 749 UK equity partners took home more than £1mn on average for a fourth straight year, despite a sharp slowdown in sales growth in the financial year that ended in May.
Revenues at Deloitte’s consulting division declined by 1 per cent during the financial year, while sales at its financial advisory practice declined 2 per cent.
The UK consulting market has been sluggish since the end of a pandemic-era boom in technology transformation work, and the slow pace of merger and acquisitions activity has also hit advisory work for the financial services sector.
Deloitte’s latest cuts signal that big firms see only limited relief in the current financial year.
Source Global, a research group focused on the consulting industry, said last month that while the market for financial services consulting would grow by about 5 per cent worldwide in 2024 — twice the pace of last year — the market in the UK would shrink by 2 per cent.
Deloitte has already overhauled its operations in the UK this year as part of a wider global reorganisation of the firm’s service lines. Its main business units were reduced to four — audit and assurance; strategy, risk and transactions; technology and transformation; and tax and legal — from the five the firm had previously.