150 jobs to be axed by Carillion

Up to 150 jobs could be lost within Carillion's building arm as the company shakes up the organisational structure of the division.

The contractor said it would start a consultation next week but it has not made a decision on how many jobs it will cut yet.

However the company said it would close its office in Exeter and that as many as 150 jobs could be cut across the whole of the country. No other offices are expected to be closed.

A spokeswoman for the firm said that the proposed cuts were part of "a review of the pipeline of secured work reflecting market conditions".

However she denied that the building division was seeing a downturn in its workload.

She also stressed that Carillion would do what it could to redeploy employees whose roles were made redundant where possible.

A spokesman later added that the proposed redundancies were part of the assimilation of Alfred McAlpine.

He said: "In effect it is part of our McAlpine integration. Wherever there is duplication we have been eliminating it. It is a mixture of back office and managerial positions where we have got two people for one post. It is about 3%-4% of our building business.

"Within the context of Carillion as a whole we will end up with several more thousand people at the end of this year than we started with."

Carillion bought Alfred McAlpine in December 2007 in a £572m deal.