Npower to cut 1460 British jobs, outsource to India

Energy provider Npower, a subsidiary of German giant RWE, announced on Thursday plans to cut about 1,460 jobs in Britain and outsource customer service operations to India. "Following its business review announced in August, Npower today announced a proposed restructure of its customer service activities, focused on delivering a more efficient, flexible and improved customer experience," it said in a statement. "Subject to consultation, the restructure would involve around 1,460 redundancies" out of a UK workforce totalling about 11,000. Npower added: "Under these proposals, customers would continue to be served on the phone by people based in UK call centres and back office functions would be outsourced to India." A total of 540 staff would switch also to retail outsourcing group Capita and Tata Consultancy Services. "Much of Npower’s customer facing work would be outsourced to Capita which has extensive retail and utility expertise," the statement added. The jb losses are in addition to 6,700 posts set to go across RWE by 2016 and announced by the German group earlier this month. RWE, Germany's second biggest power supplier with a global workforce of about 67,000, meanwhile said Tuesday that it had scrapped plans to build a gigantic wind farm in the Bristol Channel on Britain's west coast. Atlantic Array would have been one of the largest wind farms in the world with as many as 240 wind turbines generating up to 1,200 megawatts of power, supplying 900,000 households.