Halcrow to make cuts across North West sites
ENGINEERING company Halcrow has announced that it could axe up to 269 jobs, including 26 across sites in the North West.
The cuts, which mean Halcrow will lose around 6% of its 4,200 staff in the UK and Ireland, will affect 19 of the company’s offices.
In the North West it has sites in Manchester and Warrington offices, where around 26 jobs are expected to go.
Halcrow said it is starting a process of consultation with employees, so the exact number of redundancies is not yet known.
A spokesperson said: “It is anticipated there could be up to 26 job losses at the company’s Manchester and Warrington offices. These are within corporate services functions and the company’s water, power, property and consulting teams.”
The company said that it believed the engineering consultancy sector will continue to see reduced activity and even a further deterioration through 2010 and beyond.
It said the move is in response to the “continuing economic difficulties”, which have led to a reduction in the amount of work being let out as its clients come under increasing pressure to constrain their spending.
“Over the last few months this has led to a fall in the amount of work Halcrow has secured,” a statement said.
Peter Gammie, Halcrow’s chief executive, added: “It is extremely regrettable that we have had to go down this route. Since the early days of the global economic downturn, we have worked hard to minimise the effect of recession on Halcrow.
“However, we can no longer sustain current staffing levels. This difficult decision was not made lightly and throughout the consultation period, we will make every possible effort to reduce the number of redundancies and assist where we can with people’s personal arrangements.”
