BT has shed 7,731 jobs since the end of March, bringing its workforce to 90,000 — down from roughly 130,000 two years ago when contractors are included. Most cuts hit Openreach, the division that builds and maintains the UK's fibre network, as the pace of that rollout slows. The company now expects to end the decade with 75,000 to 80,000 staff, the low end of a range first sketched in 2023. AI-driven role elimination — estimated at around 10,000 positions — is part of the arithmetic. The financial logic is clean. Pre-tax profit rose 12% to £1.1bn in the six months to September. Shares jumped 6% on the announcement, touching a five-year high. BT is among the FTSE 100's best performers this year. CEO Allison Kirkby, who took over in February 2024, has raised the savings target from £3bn by 2029 to £3.7bn by 2030. The market rewarded her with a 70% share-price rise since she started. Kirkby's compensation tells the story in miniature. Her pay and bonus package more than doubled to £5.6m — the largest CEO payout at BT in over a decade. This is the standard playbook: cut headcount, reduce opex, watch margins expand, collect performance-linked compensation. The mechanism is not illegal or unusual. It is the system working as designed. The TalkTalk acquisition adds complexity. BT paid £400m for the struggling rival, securing broadband supply to 2.5 million households and public-service customers including hospitals and schools. Virgin Media O2 called the deal a "stitch-up" that reinforces BT's dominant position. BT already holds roughly 30% of UK broadband market share, and Openreach is TalkTalk's biggest supplier. The vertical integration tightens. Openreach itself reports record demand for full-fibre connections, with 24.1 million homes passed and a target of 25 million by year-end. The infrastructure buildout is real and delivers genuine public value. But the workforce that built it is being shed as the construction phase winds down. The question is whether BT reinvests efficiency gains into service quality and coverage, or whether the savings flow primarily upward to shareholders and executives. The sector pattern is unmistakable. Virgin Media O2 announced its own thousands of job cuts in an £800m savings programme the same week. UK telecoms is entering a consolidation and cost-extraction phase after a decade of capital-intensive network builds. Workers bore the physical burden of rollout; investors and executives capture the returns once the network is operational. Twenty years of this trajectory produces a UK telecoms sector that looks like UK energy or water — a small number of dominant infrastructure owners extracting reliable returns from a captive customer base, with minimal competitive pressure and a workforce reduced to the operational minimum. The fibre network is a public good built with private capital. Who benefits from it long-term depends entirely on regulatory will.
