Derry & Strabane Council request BT public contract details after job loss announcement

People Before Profit councillor Shaun Harkin proposed writing to Ms Archibald at May’s Business and Culture Committee meeting, in response to the recent news that BT plan to close its Derry office, which will result in job losses or mandatory relocation to Belfast for over 140 employees.

Councillor Harkin noted that, in addition to public funding from Invest NI to develop a new hub in Belfast, BT has been the beneficiary of “absolutely massive public sector contracts for many, many years”.

“Clearly they feel there is no responsibility tied to those contracts with anybody impacted by the decision to shut down their Derry facility, which I believe was unnecessary,” he claimed. “This is why there should be social clauses with public sector contracts.

“We have been talking about the need for social clauses to be built into regional legislation that protects jobs in the economy, What BT has done has just highlighted that.

“I would like to write to the Minister, who’s not in the line of fire on this, because I would like a better understanding of just how much public money that they’ve been able to access through tendering.”

SDLP councillor Rory Farrell supported the motion as members “need to understand how much BT have benefited from the public purse across the North”.

He concluded: “We know they got £9 million pounds in 2017 to established an innovation centre in Belfast, and the net result of that is Derry people are losing their jobs.

“That’s not fair and needs to be robustly challenged, but we also need to understand about the recurrent contracts that they have with public sector organisations.”

In a statement issued after the announcement that its Derry office could now close, a BT Group spokesperson said: “BT is going through an ambitious modernisation programme and consolidating buildings within its estate from more than 300 to closer to 30 modern workspaces. We are considering closing our office in Derry - Londonderry and we are consulting with colleagues and their unions on our proposals.

"Where appropriate, people will be given the opportunity to relocate to other roles at our Riverside Tower office in Belfast, which benefited from a multi-million pound refurbishment in 2023 and which is home to around 2,000 people. Benefiting from a state-of-the-art workplace, there are also greater career opportunities within a larger location for colleagues. There’s no impact to customers from these proposals."

The BT Group is currently undergoing a transformation and investment project, entitled The Better Workplace Programme, which involves ‘consolidating’ desk-based people into a smaller number of office locations around Britain and the north and this has included the multi-million pound refurbishment of BT’s Riverside Tower office in Belfast, which reopened in March 2023. It is understood that if deemed eligible for relocation to the Belfast office, additional travel costs will be discussed and agreed with workers in Derry who transfer to roles there.

Andrew Balfour, Local Democracy Reporter