Severn Trent Water has announced that around 500 jobs will go following changes made to its operating model and executive team structure in August.

The firm is now looking at the wider management structure to ensure that it is operating in the most effective way. In bringing the water and waste water operations businesses together Severn Trent said it had identified areas of synergies, duplication and opportunities to work with less management/support roles.

 In a statement, the utility said:

“There will be fewer roles in the business and therefore a potential impact of around 500 fewer management/support roles within our UK business (around 6000 total UK workforce ) but we will be creating up to 100 additional front line roles as customer service remains our number one priority. There are no plans to reduce the number of customer facing front line operational roles in our customer care or wholesale operation.”

Severn Trent said it is now working together with its recognised trade unions (Unison, GMB and Unite) to minimise the need for compulsory redundancies and would be seeking volunteers for redundancy in areas where it needs to lose roles. The unions have yet to comment on the proposed job cuts.

The firm has already had recruitment controls in place since July and are reducing the number of contractors and temporary resources.  Severn Trent’s statement concluded:

“We are hopeful that these measures will keep any need for compulsory redundancies to an absolute minimum.”

The announcement comes at a time when the water company is engaged in continuing discussion with water industry regulator Ofwat over its revised AMP6 Business plan.

Last week Ofwat accepted a proposal by Severn Trent Water to limit the scope of the firm’s response to the Draft Determination to a small number of critical issues. Severn Trent has suggested that in view of the tight timescale, it should focus on a relatively small number of critically important issues, rather than a broad range.