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BT staff are angry that the company is pressing ahead with plans to make around 40 Openreach employees redundant at the end of April as part of a restructuring programme.



Workers and the Prospect union are calling on the company to delay the redundancies, given the current pause in the jobs market, within the company and nationally.

One of the affected team said:



I feel like there is a moral obligation on a company like BT to give us more time to find another role, we’re not asking for them to reverse the decision. Lots of the team have worked for BT for 20-30 years.

The team were first told in March that they would be made redundant. John Ferrett, Prospect national secretary, called BT’s response “tone deaf”.

He added it is “inexcusable in the context of a wider economy that has effectively shut down.”

An Openreach spokesperson said that the redundancies have nothing to do with Covid-19, and out of the 42 people affected, four have accepted new roles and a further four have chosen to take “an enhanced voluntary redundancy leaver package”. They said:

The business is still actively recruiting internally for roles within Openreach and across BT Group, and we’re hopeful that a similar outcome can be achieved for the remainder over the next month as we continue the consultation process with unions and employee representatives.

The company denies that the recruitment process for internal roles has been frozen due to the impact of the coronavirus outbreak.

