Balfour Beatty Sheds Jobs, Targets £100m in Cost Savings

Around 400 members of Balfour Beatty’s workforce lost their jobs in the first half of this year as the infrastructure services group pursued sizeable cost savings throughout its business.

The UK-based international operator revealed in its latest set of official financial figures that jobs had been shed on a considerable scale in early 2015 as £25 million worth of cost savings were reported.

According to Balfour Beatty’s current estimates, there will be further cost savings worth £25 million every six months going forward with a total of £100 million set to be saved by the end of 2016.

Jobs have reportedly been lost within a number of different operating units at Balfour Beatty, with employees focussed on IT, human resources, financing and legal matters among those to have moved on so far in 2015.

“Significant progress has been made to streamline the enabling functions within the Group, with new senior leadership in place for Finance, IT, Health and Safety, Legal, Communications and Investor Relations, Risk and Assurance and Procurement across the organisation,” a statement from the group said.

“The changes reduce costs where services have previously been duplicated in more than one business unit and ensure that best practice is delivered across Balfour Beatty in a consistent way.”

Official statements also explained that Balfour Beatty had been left with “multiple IT platforms” throughout its business as a result of having acquired so many companies over the course of the past decade.

These disparate platforms are now being integrated in ways that ultimately save the group money and require fewer IT experts to service and maintain.

This “rationalisation” of IT systems has also reportedly boosted the productivity of Balfour Beatty’s workforce more generally with associated issues said to have been greatly reduced.

Despite having been able to cut costs significantly in 2015, Balfour Beatty reported underlying losses worth £135 million for the first six months of the year, a figure down notably on the profit of £37 million reported in the same period of 2014.

However, the group clearly has a healthy supply of contracts with the overall value of its order book currently at close to £11.3 billion.