Last updated 13:11, Thursday, 20 November 2008

BAE Systems has announced it is cut to 25 jobs at the Barrow shipyard. It is shedding up to 200 jobs in its land systems business across the UK.
The firm blamed the cuts on a decline in workload on the Ministry of Defence’s Armoured Fighting Vehicle programmes and said a voluntary redundancy programme is being launched immediately.
David Allott, managing director of BAE Systems Land Systems, said: “BAE Systems has been working with the UK MoD, in line with the defence industrial strategy, to build a long-term, sustainable land systems business and transform its UK operations to better meet the needs of the front line.
“In the armoured vehicle sector, we are looking to match our internal planning to potential long-term workload and this has led us to these job losses.
“We recognise the impact these job losses will have on our employees and the communities in which we operate and we always aim to mitigate as much as possible the impact of losses by offering voluntary redundancy where we can, as well as re-skilling and retraining people for alternative roles.
“We have been able to postpone this decision due to high workload on meeting urgent operational requirements, but that activity is now tailing off.”
The job losses will affect factories in Barrow, Newcastle, Leeds, Leicester and Telford, the company said.