Authors: JordanVirgin Media is cutting as many as 500 jobs as it streamlines its UK staffing arrangements.The company currently employs 14,000 people across more than 100 locations in the UK, but the biggest impact of the cuts will be felt in customer service, where there are plans to reduce the number of sites from eight to four.Centres in Nottingham and Swansea, where 800 people are currently employed, will be shut down, with a number of other locations merged into new regional hubs.Virgin Media jobs"Last year Virgin Media began a three-year property investment programme to create fewer, higher-quality work places to better support our people, our business and growing customer base, said Tom Mockridge, Virgin Media CEO.As a result, we plan to invest an additional 40m over the next three years to refurbish key sites and acquire new alternative sites.
As part of this we intend to create four regional customer operations hubs while increasing the flexibility of our customer services resources.We have also proposed the closure of a small number of our offices over the next two years including our call centre in Swansea and our current site in Nottingham.
We will be increasing our presence in Wythenshawe, near Manchester, and refurbishing that site.
We also propose acquiring a major new building in the Reading/M4 corridor area for our people presently based in Hook, Langley, Slough and Winnersh.We also plan to acquire smaller, better sites in Bellshill and Nottingham.
Together these changes will help deliver a more agile, digitally-oriented experience which our customers increasingly expect as standard.We are now working with and supporting all employees who have been asked to relocate, who may be in a role at risk of redundancy or who may wish to take another role with Virgin Media or one of our partners.Virgin Media is currently in the middle of a 3bn Project Lightning network expansion programme that should see its cable footprint expand to 17 million premises by the end of 2019.
However progress slowed at the start of 2017, leading to management changes that brought the project back on track.The company also operates a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), delivering mobile services to customers on EEs network.