NORTH West Water and Norweb have announced more than 600 job losses as part of a £400million programme to cut costs.

The companies, which joined to become United Utilities in 1996, say they have already reduced their workforce by 300 in the last year and another 320 jobs will be lost over a five-year period.

Spokesman John Carberry said the cuts include 400 jobs in their water business and 220 in their electricity business. He said there would be no compulsory redundancies and cuts would be made through voluntary redundancies, early retirement and recruitment freezes.

The cuts come in the wake of Ofwat's ruling in November that North West Water must reduce its bills to customers by four per cent over the next five years, which United Utilities said would cut revenues by £140million a year.

In November, North West Water announced plans to contract out maintenance work, affecting 500 workers, in a bid to improve efficiency.

GMB Union representative Pat O'Shaughnessy said the job losses and out-sourcing were a knee-jerk reaction to the reduced income.

He said: "Customers should be aware that the company is trying to solve its problem by the easiest route possible.

"If we lose hundreds of people it will have a tremendous effect. The quality of service can only suffer because the people that remain will be under pressure. "We feel confident that if they sat down and talked to us in a sensible manner, we could find a way to retain these jobs."

Mr O'Shaughnessy said employees had known that jobs were under review but had not been aware of the scale of the cuts, and that unions had not been consulted about the losses.

He said 1,000 GMB, Unison and other union members would demonstrate against the cuts in Manchester on Saturday.

Mr Carberry said the staff reductions meant customers would get a better service from a more efficient company.

He said: "We are household names in the North West and we would not do anything to undermine our service to our customers."

North West Water has already transferred its engineering, IT services and customer service centres to contractors and most of the work on the region's water supply network is also carried out by contractors.

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