BT slashes 13,000 office staff and abandons central London HQ to save £1.5bn
BT has set itself an ambitious cost saving target of £1.5bn through reducing its workforce by 13,000 by 2021 and abandoning its prestigious central London head office.
BT slashes 13,000 office staff and abandons central London to save £1.5bn
Back office staff and middle managers at the telecommunications giant are braced for the brunt of the cutbacks, having been put on notice that two-thirds of the global reduction in headcount to be drawn from its 80,000 strong UK workforce.
The balance will be drawn from BT’s 18,000 international staff but the exodus will be offset somewhat by the employment of 6,000 new staff, predominantly in customer service and engineering as BT scales up its Openreach subsidiary, now a separate brand, to improve broadband infrastructure.
In addition to reducing its headcount, BT will also rationalise its office requirements including the symbolic loss of its St Paul’s HQ, occupied by the business for close to 150 years. BT has pledged to retain its head office in the capital however.
The latest round of redundancies follows an earlier cull of 4,000 posts announced last May, part of a separate drive to save £300m over two years.
