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MP’s fury as npower shuts Teesside branch

A Teesside MP has angrily criticised the Government after npower confirmed the closure of their site at Thornaby, near Stockton.

The German-owned company, which on Sunday will hike gas and electricity prices by 10.4% to nearly £1,500 a year for average bills, said it wanted a more “efficient, flexible and improved customer experience”.

More than 500 staff at the Thornaby site, which will close next June, have been told their jobs are safe, but must relocate to the firm’s head offices in Sunderland.

Staff will be offered support to get to Wearside every day, or take voluntary redundancy, with employees currently going into a 60-day consultancy process.

As part of npower’s national restructuring, a total of 1,460 jobs (430 in the North East) will be axed.

npower says that customers will continue to be served by people based in UK call centres.

But back office functions - such as checking meter readings against customers’ bills - will be outsourced to India using Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

Tom Blenkinsop, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough and East Cleveland, which neighbours the Stockton South constituency, told Bdaily: “This government doesn’t want to regulate the energy market properly, doesn’t want to freeze energy prices, has effectively given the £600k-a-year CEO of npower a tax cut, and now has hardly anything to say about over 400 jobs at npower in the North East being shipped abroad.

“Quite frankly local Tory MPs have been utterly useless whilst raining involvement and interest in this ongoing issue for the working people of this area.”

npower bosses insist the company is committed to the North East, despite the restructuring.

The firm’s customer service director, Gareth Pickles, added: There’ll still be around 3,500 people in the region helping npower customers every day.

“As a business, we’re operating in extremely tough times and we’ve had to look at what’s right for the long term future of the company.

“We also have to keep our costs as low as possible when our customers are seeing bills going up due to a range of external factors.”

npower currently employs around 4,000 people altogether in the North East.

Paul Massara, npower CEO, said: “This restructure is necessary if we are to deliver the levels of service our customers deserve.

“All calls would still be answered in the UK. We would have the flexibility to keep call waiting times down during busy periods, and continue to keep costs down so we can keep bills down.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Martin Walker .