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Housing association bosses made crass references to hit TV show Game of Thrones while telling worried staff about impending redundancies, it was claimed.

Staff facing the prospect of joblessness at Your Housing were reportedly told “winter is coming - change is coming” during an announcement.

Workers who contacted the ECHO said they were “outraged” by the “insensitive” alleged remarks - and that it made a “difficult situation even worse”.

An unspecified number of staff at the firm face losing their jobs because a forecast £65m shortfall over the next five years.

A spokeswoman for Your Housing said it had comment to make about the alleged remarks.

But in relation to the redundancies, a statement told how a government-imposed 1% rent reduction would “impact on our business plan to the tune of £65m over five years”.

It read: “On top of that, other sources of funding are no longer available to us and so, if we don’t change our business and become more efficient, we won’t be able to continue to improve our services for residents and build more homes.

“So, we have started a significant programme of change and are looking at every part of our business to see where we can make improvements and savings which will inevitably mean there will be less people working for us. But we would stress that services will not suffer as a result, in fact our aim is to make them even better, and we have no plans to close any of our sheltered schemes.

“This means that sadly, we will see colleagues leaving the organisation - again at different times within that 18 month period - and this will start to happen from now. This is a very difficult for our staff but it is a process we need to go through and we are committed to doing it as sensitively as possible.”

“Winter is coming” is the motto of House Stark in Game of Thrones, and is used to warn that unpleasant times are ahead.