BT to cut 13,000 jobs in a bid to save £1.5bn following revenue fall

Job losses will be offset by recruitment of 6,000 new engineers, customer service staff and security specialists

BT is to cut 13,000 jobs over the next three years and vacate its London HQ in Newgate Street in the City in a bid to cut costs by £1.5bn.

The announcement today coincided with the unveiling of the company's annual results for the year to the end of March, which revealed revenue down by one per cent for the year, but by three per cent for the final quarter.

The job losses amount to around 13 per cent of the company's global workforce and come on top of job cuts of 4,000 job cuts announced almost a year ago to the day.

It also comes just a week after reports that the company was planning to axe 10,000 staff.

At the same time, though, the company said it would hire about 6,000 front-line engineers, customer service and cyber security specialists.

BT said the job losses would come mainly from back office and middle management roles, with around two-thirds of the job cuts set to fall on the company's 80,000-strong UK workforce, with the remainder coming from the 18,000 staff it employs internationally.

"Decisions like this are not easy, we recognise that it is going to affect a lot of people but ultimately we need to do these things to ensure that we remain a competitive business going forward and that we can benchmark our performance against peer companies," said BT CEO Gavin Patterson.

He added that it was the "right thing for the business" and would help take BT "into its next chapter".

The company is also planning to move out of its London headquarters in St Paul's, where the company has been based since 1874. The company will continue to maintain a "smaller presence" in London at a yet to be decided location.

BT was also last year hit by a £42 million fine from regulator Ofcom, plus a £300m compensation bill, for its failings around ‘deemed consent' in its Openreach division. Ofcom has been working to break the BT/Openreach monopoly on fibre access for several years.

It is also committed to closing the yawning £11.3 billion deficit in the corporate pension fund, with payments of £2.1 billion over the three years to 31 March 2020, together with a £2 billion contribution that will be funded by a bond issue.

In response to the cull, Philippa Childs, the general secretary of the Prospect union, said: "The scale of these jobs cuts is higher than had been previously speculated on and come as a devastating blow to managers and professionals represented by Prospect.

"Many of the roles that BT is proposing to cut are highly skilled professionals and the loss of that expertise could impact BT's research and innovation capability."

News of the job cuts comes after last year's Italian accounting scandal. The firm was also last year hit by a £42 million fine from regulator Ofcom, plus a £300 million compensation bill, for its failings around ‘deemed consent' in its Openreach division.