Sorry to hear of these redundacies, it's never a good time to lose colleagues. I'm only new here, but reading these posts gives me a feeling of deja vu !
I'm a maintenance engineer for a bus company. We used to be a lot of smaller local companies until de-regulation and the growth of the big companies. They bought up all the smaller ones (similar to how NTL and Telewest have grown). Then found their costs were too high, to started chopping away behind the scenes to get costs down.
They're reluctant to cut drivers as that's the public face of the company (a bit like your Call Centre staff), but have cut the maintenance side lots (we've come from 12 engineers and 4 apprentices, to five engineers and no apprentices over the years). A similar position to how your engineering dep't is going.
The management don't have the foresight to see if we aren't there maintaining their network of vehicles (same as you with ntl's network), the service just doesn't run. Buses can't be on the road with no support services, the same as TV phone, and Internet won't work without support either.
Our firm would now rather bring in an outside firm at £80 an hour, than have enough of it's own staff to deal with problems in house.
The similarities are uncanny.
Sorry for you all.
