Capita, which runs services for local councils, the military and the NHS and manages the BBC TV licence fee, plans to cut 900 jobs as part of efforts to save costs, many of them in the UK.
The embattled outsourcing group said the cuts would affect mainly support function workers and roles such as admin, rather than customer-facing staff.
Capita employs 43,000 people, mostly in the UK but also across Europe, India and South Africa. It has six main hubs across the UK, in London, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Edinburgh and Belfast.
The London-listed firm said it would soon start consulting employees on the changes, which are expected to save £60m a year from next year.
Capita is still recovering from a cyber-attack that began in March and is costing it as much as £25m, pushing the company to a pre-tax loss of almost £68m for the first half of the year.
The Black Basta ransomware group hacked Capita’s Microsoft Office 365 software and accessed the personal data of staff working for the company as well as dozens of clients.
Jon Lewis, the Capita chief executive, said: “We are, today, announcing the accelerated delivery of the efficiency savings announced in our half-year results with a £20m increase in overhead cost reduction to £60m on an annualised basis from the first quarter of 2024.
“As part of the organisational review which underpins the programme we are announcing today, we continue to identify further areas of cost efficiency and will pursue these during 2024.”
The company has not ruled out further job cuts.
The redundancy programme will result in one-off costs of £27m. Capita said it was trading in line with expectations and has so far won contracts worth £2.9bn, compared with £2.6bn in 2022 for the entire year.
Earlier this year, Capita sold its resourcing and non-core software businesses to focus on its main divisions: Capita Public Service, which supplies software, IT and business process services to the UK government; and Capita Experience, which provides pensions administration, payment and other services. The company administers more than 450 pension schemes with 4.3 million members in the UK.
This week, it announced it had won a £239m 10-year contract to manage the civil service pension scheme, one of the largest public sector plans in the UK, from September 2025.
Capita shares rose 10% to 21p on Tuesday after it announced the job cuts.
