Centrica-owned British Gas has become the latest energy supplier to furlough staff, with almost 4,000 workers being placed on paid leave.
The UK’s largest energy supplier confirmed that 3,800 out of around 20,000 employees would be placed on the government-backed scheme at 80 per cent pay and that it had focused around 85 per cent of its workforce on emergency work. The rest, it said, cannot be redeployed to essential operations.
Having said this, British Gas expects to have completed more than 100,000 emergency/ jobs for vulnerable people by the end of this week.
A spokesperson for the company said: “Our employees are playing a vital role in keeping our customers warm and ensuring they have hot water and power to stay connected. However, we’ve had to scale back some of our operations to focus on emergency work only and looking after our vulnerable customers.
“In the short-term we are placing some colleagues, who we can’t redeploy to emergency or vulnerable operations, into furlough to protect jobs and our business. They will receive 100 percent of their regular salary.”
Centrica last week announced it would cut cash expenditure by around £400 million this financial year, reducing non-essential operating costs and the delay of capital and restructuring projects, to mitigate the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
It also cancelled its 2019 final dividend payment of 3.5p per share which was expected to be £204 million in total.
The energy giant joins Eon, Npower and Ovo Energy who have also furloughed a similar number of people.