Rolls-Royce to axe 4,000 jobs, say reports

Rolls-Royce will cut up to 4,000 jobs this week as part of its restructuring programme, according to reports, with Derby to be particularly hard hit.

The Sunday Times reports that those jobs being axed will include middle managers and back office staff at Derby.

The news will come as a blow to Derby only two months after the company announced it was back in the black, reporting a pre-tax profit of £4.9bn.

Rolls-Royce employs around 14,000 staff in Derby.

Despite the Sunday Times, report, the Unite union has dismissed the reports as “pure speculation” to the Derby Telegraph, while the same newspaper is quoting Rolls-Royce as saying: “In January, we announced a simplification of our business and began work on a restructuring of our support and management functions.

“We added at the time of our annual results in March that we would focus on operational restructuring of management, support and engineering and technology functions across the corporate centre and also in our three divisions (Civil Aerospace, Defence and Power Systems).

“We are proposing to move to a considerably simplified staff structure, with fewer layers and greater spans of control across the group.

“We said we had retained restructuring experts Alvarez & Marsal to support us with this programme.

“We added that we expected this programme to deliver a significant reduction in costs and assist us in improving performance across the Group as a whole, and that we would provide clarity of these benefits at an event for financial analysts and investors on 15 June.

“We are not commenting on current media speculation about the potential impact.”

Meanwhile, in a separate development, Rolls-Royce has announced that it is to carry out a one-off inspection of its Trent 1000 Package B Boeing fleet after finding similar Intermediate Pressure Compressor durability issues to the ones discovered on its Package C engines.

The Package B standard has been in service since 2012 and consists of 166 engines.

A statement from the company said: “While the consequences of the additional inspection requirements for Package B engines will incur some additional cost, this together with our latest understanding of the Package C service impact forecast and the mitigating actions we continue to take across the group, enable us to be confident that our FY18 guidance for Group FCF of around £450m +/- £100m remains unchanged.”

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