The writing wa son the wall for the redundancies the moment the pension deal went through, what better way to reduce the now limited pension liabilty even further than by getting rid of people.
The pension change is irrelevant. The writing was on the wall when those with little chance of being made redundant took the blood money to change the redundancy scheme. In previous downturns it was so expensive to make people redundant it wasn't really an option. It's still expensive but no longer too expensive.
just to show that the redundancies were done fairly I am sure that there will be a few atco redundancies in there as well.
PB told the CTC bar stool sessions that there would be no ATCO redundancies and indeed ATCO recruitment would continue through the downturn. I suspect he meant those holding ratings when he said that. That does of course mean that there will have to be double the pain in other parts to compensate if indeed redundancies become necessary.