Hundreds of job cuts hit county

More than 600 potential job losses were announced in Warwickshire on Wednesday.

HSBC said it was cutting 1,200 jobs in the UK including about 280 at an operations centre in Leamington Spa.

Warwickshire County Council said it was still in talks with trade unions about potential job losses and had so far managed to get these below 300 posts.

Stratford District Council said up to 30 posts would be lost and Ricardo, an engineering firm near Leamington Spa, said it could lose up to 40 staff.

'At risk'

Ricardo managing director Paul McNamara said the company, which employs 1,000 people in the UK and has a plant in Radford Semele, was aiming to cut 90 jobs in total.

HSBC said the job cuts were due to "a challenging operating environment" and were in addition to the 500 jobs lost at the bank's London head office in December.

Rileys snooker club has also gone into administration. Nine people are to lose their jobs at Rileys in Newdegate Street, Nuneaton. It is one of 30 sites closing in the UK, along with one in Birmingham and two in Staffordshire.

Administrators have sold the business to a new operator although 129 other sites will continue to trade under the same name elsewhere in the country.

Warwickshire County Council said it was "confident that the numbers of staff at risk" could be reduced even further through redeployment, careful management of recruitment and normal staff turnover.

It said: "This has already proved successful in reducing the numbers of potential job reductions to below 300 and we are hopeful that this will be further reduced over the next 12 months."

Stratford-on-Avon District Council said it had left posts vacant because of the "tightening economic situation". It said through a combination of early retirement offers and voluntary redundancies "it is anticipated that there will be few if any compulsory redundancies to meet the budget deficit of over £2m in 2009/10."