White collar jobs face axe

There are fears that up to 100 design jobs could go at Barrow shipyard by April unless the government comes up with stopgap work. During the year there has been concern for that hundreds of vital design and drawing office jobs in Barrow will be threatened unless more work is found. Work on surface warships has finished for the time being, and that on the first Astute nuclear submarine is running down.

Fears that some jobs could go as early as Easter emerged during the annual meeting of the job creation agency, Furness Enterprise. Concern has worsened because of the 63 redundancies, mainly in the drawing office, that were declared at BAE?s Clyde shipyards.

Unless work on the new aircraft carriers is brought forward by the Ministry of Defence, there will be job losses and FE?s chief executive, Harry Knowles, told an audience of business and local authority representatives last week: “We are going to have one of the biggest naval building programmes in decades with aircraft carriers and logistics ships.

That means in a couple of years we will have to increase the number of people in naval shipbuilding ? and yet we are busy making people redundant which is ludicrous.”

He warned: “There is a real problem of a shortage in design engineering and if we don?t fix that, other good people are going to lose their jobs.”