Granada cuts 430 jobs

More than 400 jobs are at risk in Granada's ITV empire.

The redundancies, which the company announced today November 28, have been blamed on a slump in advertising revenue and Granada's mounting losses in ITV Digital.

Details of the cuts have not been released, except for a warning of 25 redundancies at the end of 2001 when Granada plans to shut its Wellbeing TV channel.

All of the 430 job cuts are due to take place over the next 12 months, and the company says that it will achieve many of them through natural wastage.

This latest cuts announcement comes after 650 redundancies in the year up to September 2001, 80 of them on the Wellbeing channel. By September next year, Granada will have cut more than 1,000 jobs since taking over Meridian, Anglia, and HTV.

There has been no denial of rumours about the imminent closure of two small news bases - Newbury in the Meridian area, and Blackburn in Granada TV's home patch.

BECTU has said it remains committed to regional programming within ITV, and will challenge the two closures if the ITC regulator is asked to approve them.