Nearly 400 job cuts proposed at Stansted Airport

Charlie Cornish, chief executive of MAG, owner of Stansted Airport. (Image: Archant)

Manchester Airport Group (MAG), which owns Stansted, has proposed cutting 376 jobs at the airport as part of nearly 900 planned redundancies across the group.

It has entered into a 45-day consultation period with staff and unions about the job losses, as well as 465 redundancies at Manchester Airport and 51 at East Midlands Airport.

Most of the job losses will come from roles within the terminal building. These include security officers, customer service staff and cleaners.

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MAG says the proposed job losses follow a 90% reduction in demand for travel through its airports since March.

The group asked every employee to take a 10% pay cut for a year, as well as pausing capital investment and non-essential expenditure.

Despite this and the government support schemes such as furlough, MAG says the job cuts are necessary to protect the future of the business.

Charlie Cornish, MAG chief executive, said: “By now, we would have hoped to see a strong and sustained recovery in demand.

“Unfortunately, the resurgence of the virus across Europe and the reintroduction of travel restrictions have meant this has not happened.

“With uncertainty about when a vaccine will be widely available, we need to be realistic about when demand is likely to recover.

“The end of the Job Retention Scheme means that we have to consider the number of roles that we can sustain at our airports.

“We will be discussing these issues with our trade unions, and consulting them fully on a range of options for reducing the size and overall cost of our workforce.

“We want to work with them to make sure we minimise the impact on our people as much as we can.

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“I want to thank everyone across MAG for the dedication they have shown through the toughest summer our industry has ever seen.

“MAG and other UK airports remain fundamentally strong businesses that will play an important role in driving the country’s recovery, but the specific and short-term pressures of the pandemic are exceptional and particularly challenging for our sector.

“We are proud of our long-standing role in supporting communities around our airports and underpinning the employment of more than 130,000 people across the UK.

“We will continue to work to protect as many jobs as possible, maintain dialogue with our trade unions, and continue to make the case to government for the direct support that UK aviation needs.”