BT boss Jansen bags £1.8m bonus as group plans to slash workforce

BT has revealed its boss took home a £1.8 million bonus last year as the telecoms giant plans to shed up to 55,000 jobs by the end of the decade.

Philip Jansen, the group’s chief executive, secured the annual bonus despite the firm’s sweeping cost-cutting plans raising the alarm among unions.

He bagged the £1.8 million in cash and share awards, on top of his £1.3 million fixed pay, taking his total pay packet for the latest financial year to £3.1 million.

It was only a slight reduction on the £3.35 million the boss took home last year.

Executive directors can get an annual bonus worth up to double their base salary, primarily based upon BT’s financial performance.

However, BT saw its pre-tax profit slide by 12% to £1.7 billion over the past year, and a slight dip in revenues.

Meanwhile, BT said Mr Jansen has “volunteered to waive any salary increases” beyond the current financial year. His £1.1 million base salary was due to be renewed this year after being fixed since 2019.

It comes as the group, which also owns mobile networks EE and Plusnet, and full-fibre, broadband network Openreach, unveiled drastic plans to reshape the business.

It said last month it wants to rely on a much smaller workforce and reduced cost base, and to automate some processes like customer support.

BT has invested billions in bringing its full-fibre broadband to homes across Britain.

But once this project is complete, it will not need as many engineers to build and maintain the network, the company said.

This means that about 15,000 jobs will be shed when investment in the new infrastructure begins to taper off, and more than 10,000 will disappear as the group looks to stop running double networks like 3G and 4G.

Furthermore, about 10,000 jobs are set to be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) and automated services, leading to some alarm over the scale of the job cuts.

The union Prospect, which says it represents thousands of managers at BT, said it was “deeply concerned by the scale” of the job cuts.

John Ferrett, its national secretary, said: “Announcing such a huge reduction in this way will be very unsettling for workers who did so much to keep the country connected during the pandemic.”

He said the union had demanded an urgent meeting with Mr Jansen over the plans.

Similarly, the Communication Workers Union (CWU) said that the completion of the fibre infrastructure was “always going to result in less labour costs for the company in the coming years”.

But it added: “However, we have made it categorically clear to BT that we want to retain as many direct labour jobs as possible and that any reduction should come from sub-contractors in the first instance and natural attrition.”

The CWU also demanded to “be in the room” when the organisational changes are discussed.