BT is to announce a number of job losses when it issues its latest financial results next week.
A Thursday report in The Times suggested that there will be thousands of job cuts, although the company is refusing to specify numbers ahead of the results.
The cuts will come as the result of a major restructuring drive announced in April. As part of the drive, two new units — BT Design and BT Operate — were created. The drive is part of BT's ongoing mission to morph from a telecoms company into an IT services provider.
When the restructuring was announced, a BT spokesperson told ZDNet.co.uk that it would "entail no redundancies and no job cuts". Instead, the spokesperson said, it would just mean the transferral of 20,000 employees from existing divisions into the new units. However, another spokesperson said on Thursday that the reorganisation was "always going to entail job losses".
"We said no-one would be forced out of a job," the spokesperson told ZDNet.co.uk. "We have made very attractive packages available and quite a lot of people have said they would retire early. This has all been done with the unions and on good terms with those people who have chosen leave."
The article in The Times quoted Citigroup analysts as saying the cuts could account for £230m of the £450m cost of the reorganisation.
One significant figure who is definitely leaving is Andy Green, the man who was, in April, given the job of overseeing BT Design and BT Operate. He will start his new job as head of the services company LogicaCMG at the start of next year. BT's spokesperson denied that his departure was in any way related to the cuts, saying only that he had received "a bloody good offer elsewhere".
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BT's spokesperson suggested that the majority of the job losses would occur in the middle-management layer, in cases where the formation of the new units would remove previous duplication of roles. The spokesperson added that other divisions, such as BT Openreach, had recently been recruiting more staff, and even claimed that next week's results might show that the company had grown overall.
