Thames Water is preparing to cut 300 jobs as it struggles to reduce its £14 billion debt mountain - more than half of the roles are currently vacant.

The water company has launched a redundancy consultation which mainly targets roles in its retail and digital divisions - in January this year Thames started a recruitment drive for a range of digital roles, including in cyber security, programming, data and insights,

GMB, Unite and Unison were all consulted before the announcement -

A spokespersonfor Thames Water said:

“The last year has been an extremely challenging year for the business and we continue to take a rigorous approach to financial discipline throughout the company in order to operate within budget.

“We need to make more difficult but necessary decisions to ensure we continue to deliver to our budgets. That’s why today we’ve announced a range of measures to reduce our costs further and become more efficient.”

“We will seek to minimise compulsory redundancies wherever possible, through redeployment and voluntary redundancy.”

A statement issued by the GMB Trade Union yesterday said Thames had announced up to 140 redundancies - in a meeting with GMB, the company said it would begin consulting on plans to cut 89 retail jobs and 39 digital jobs.

Gary Carter GMB National Officer commented:

“Thames Water has danced with the devil and now workers are paying the price.

“In the 40 years since privatisation, we’ve seen virtually no investment, systematic asset stripping and billions of public money drained from the system to fill already bulging shareholder and fat cat coffers.

“As a result, Thames is on it’s knees and water workers are losing their livelihoods.

“It’s abhorrent and systematic of the failed experiment that is water privatisation.

“GMB will fight to minimise any compulsory redundancies and make sure our members get every penny they are due.”