Capita seeks 99 heads for chopping block

Capita IT services biz is bowing to economic pressures by seeking voluntary redundancies just weeks before Christmas.

The integrator wants 99 staff members across six operating units to place their heads on the chopping block.

A spokeswoman at Capita told El Reg that following numerous acquisitions it has made, the business has "identified a duplication of roles throughout the organisation".

She continued: "We have reviewed our operating model in order to make the business more efficient and productive ... as a result, we have launched a limited voluntary redundancy scheme in which we are seeking up to 99 voluntary redundancies.”

Not so, according to staff, who claim Capita is simply battening down the hatches.

The firm told employees that to maintain a profitable entity, it had undertaken a "variety of austerity measures", including reviewing travel and subsistence across the IT Services division and evaluating its procurement of systems and services.

"We still need to do even more in order to meet our Unity Programme objectives and continue to operate in an increasingly difficult and challenging economic climate for 2012," Capita told its staff in a memo seen by The Register.

Voluntary redundancy will be offered to staff in applications management; distributed infrastructure services; integrated solutions; procurement and logistics; service management; and tools and automation.

Capita told employees that the redundancy programme was "far from ideal timing" but that it had been unable to "avoid the pressures caused by our economic climate".

Concerned staff will be hoping that 99 of the folk actually want to make the break and that the voluntary redundancies do not lead to compulsory job cuts next year.

The integrator said in its interim report on 18 November that the market for large outsourcing deals had become "increasingly active" during 2011, while cost-cutting in the private sector was "creating opportunities for outsourcing".

This was also true of the public sector, as the ongoing pressure to reduce budgets and maintain frontline services was "creating a healthy pipeline of opportunities in local government and there are also a number of opportunities arising across local government".

"We expect to achieve reasonable revenue growth and stable year on year margin for the full year 2011. Our strong major contracts sales performance, the contribution from acquisitions in 2011 and our buoyant bid pipeline will support stronger revenue growth in 2012," Capita said. ®