Rolls-Royce to shed 1,100 jobs

Rolls-Royce, the aircraft engine maker, is to cut 1,100 jobs over three years from 2004 as part of a plan to invest in state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities at three UK plants.

The world's second-largest civil aircraft engine maker blamed a market downturn for the layoffs, but said that the main aim of the job reduction was to modernise 100-year-old plants in order to boost competitiveness.

"Some of these buildings we are working in at the moment are 100 years old and we're making 21st century aircraft engines in 19th century buildings," a Rolls-Royce spokesman said.

"So what we're actually looking to do is to update these buildings and by doing that we're introducing new working practices to make it globally competitive."

In November 2001 the firm announced a total of 5,000 redundancies worldwide, with 3,800 in the UK.

"Those redundancies followed the September 11 attacks and around half of the redundancies in the UK were in Derby," said the spokesman. "That process is almost complete, with the remaining job losses taking place this year. The new job losses announced today are separate from that process."

Rolls-Royce employs 11,000 workers in Derby, 4,000 in Bristol and 700 at a site in Hucknall. The planned job cuts represent just under 5% of its British workforce of about 22,500.

Darren Howard, 37, who works for Rolls-Royce in Bristol, said: "I haven't heard all the facts and figures yet but it's all part of the main scheme of things at the moment. It's quite a brave decision but shows how Rolls-Royce is thinking. I believe there's still a great future for Rolls-Royce and its share price doesn't reflect its actual worth. There will unfortunately be job cuts but Rolls-Royce will help us how it can. We have been debriefed by e-mail and treated very fairly."