BT Open Voluntary Redundancies Scheme for Staff in N.Ireland UK

Telecoms giant BT has opened a voluntary leaver programme for its business in Ireland and Northern Ireland, which some reports claim could result in the loss of 100 jobs. But this is arguably overshadowed by recent recruitment elsewhere.

According to the Irish Times, BT employs around 3,000 staff across the whole of Ireland (2,000 of which are in N.Ireland) and they’re currently said to be “very satisfied with how our Ireland business is performing“. Never the less a spokesperson has confirmed that “a voluntary leaver programme is currently open for employees to avail of“. At the same time it’s worth pointing out that BT last year moved to recruit 165 new call centre related jobs in Belfast.

The operator currently has 160,000 superfast broadband (FTTC/P) subscribers in N.Ireland, although it’s noted that their roll-out of “fibre broadband” services in the north is comparatively mature (96% have access to a next generation network, dropping to 91% in rural areas) and so the need for some staff could be lower than in previous years (engineers?).

Never the less Ofcom separately reports that 12% of N.I connections still receive sub-2Mbps broadband speeds, although some of these might be on slower connections out of choice (i.e. they could upgrade if they wanted). So there’s clearly still some work to do and that final 4% can be extremely expensive to tackle.

A similar situation may eventually crop up across the rest of the UK in a few years’ time, when BT’s national BDUK funded deployment reaches its conclusion and the need for engineers starts to fall. We should stress that the “leaver programme” mentioned above is not only open to engineers, we’re just speculating on that side of things.