Blog Post
2,600 SSE Staff to Lose their Jobs as Ovo Announces Redundancies
Richard Simmonds • May 19, 2020
2,600 employees at energy supplier SSE are set to lose their jobs after new owner Ovo announced a host of redundancies across the business.
Coronavirus crisis
According to Ovo, it will ask 2,600 of its staff to apply for voluntary redundancy after the Coronavirus crisis
forced it to speed up its integration plans.
In a move that is sure to anger some, around 8 out of 10 redundancies will come via those SSE employees who came part of Ovo’s £500 million to purchase the retail arm of the business.
The bulk of the job losses are likely to be among those roles operating out in the field such as meter readers and home engineers.
The Coronavirus lockdown has meant (through no fault of their own) that many in those roles have been unable to do their usual jobs and has resulted in changes to the industry such as more customers now being forced to read their own meters. a hugely damaging side effect of the lockdown.
Unexpected?
According to the MP for Perth and North Perthshire, Pete Wishart he was assured by SSE that there would be no job losses following Ovo’s takeover.
As well as the announced job losses, Ovo will also be closing two offices, in Reading and Glasgow and a third in Selkirk that it acquired when it rescued Spark Energy in 2018.
The staff at the offices are expected to be transferred to other offices or to be giving the option to work from home.
“There is never an easy time to announce redundancies and this is a particularly difficult decision to take. But like all businesses, we face a new reality and need to adapt quickly to enable us to better serve our customers and invest in a zero-carbon future,” said chief executive Stephen Fitzpatrick.
Ovo claims that more and more consumers have adapted to the lockdown world and are utilising technology more.
“We are seeing a rapid increase in customers using digital channels to engage with us and, in our experience, once customers start to engage differently, they do not go back. As a result, we are expecting a permanent reduction in demand for some roles whilst other field-based roles are also heavily affected,” Fitzpatrick said.
Just the beginning?
Since its creation in 2009, Ovo has gained something of a reputation for hiring far more people than it fires so this move is a big change and potentially paints a grim picture for the wider energy industry.
Since then Ovo has rapidly risen to become one of the biggest challenger energy suppliers on the market and its purchase of SSE has seen it break into the ‘Big Six’
to become the second largest.
The wider impacts of the government lockdown have still to reveal themselves but with the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) data showing that the number of people claiming unemployment benefit in the UK soared by 856,500 to 2.1 million in April, the outlook is pretty grim.
Further Reading
As UK lockdown is extended, Ofgem remind Energy Suppliers of their obligations
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