LTB 189/2023 17 July 2023

TO ALL BT BRANCHES

Dear Colleague

BT Business: Proposed Changes in Field Services (Job Cuts)

We have been advised by management that they are proposing to cut forty-two roles from a pool of seventy-two field engineers. The in-scope population is based on individual utilisation levels, i.e. the amount of time an engineer spends doing actual field work.

Management has advised us that those in scope all have a utilisation level below 60%. The selection criteria for getting this figure down from 72 to 42 are still awaited and selection will take place via a desk top assessment. Of those in-scope 19 are TM2s (Specialist Engineers) and 53 TM3s (Senior Specialist Engineers).

Management have said that this reduction is due to customer demand, increasing their utilisation requirement to 90% and to meet their part of the £6m cost challenge. So it is confirmed that part of the cut rests on the remaining field engineers working harder.

The unions has major concerns around some aspects of managements approach and the union believes that at least some of the reasons provided are arbitrary.

Those exempt from the cuts are;

The CE (TM1) grades which is apparently reflective of current and future work demand

Dedicated contract engineers where we have a contractual obligation

Control function and Support function areas along with manager grades

Again, Business are refusing to implement an EOI phase in this process because of two ‘recently’ held voluntary release schemes, one in mid-December last year and one in April of this. They have also provided the standard wording about looking for alternative roles.

Yours sincerely

Allan EldredAssistant Secretary

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