BT plans to close its Liverpool office at The Plaza on Old Hall Street when the lease expires in March 2027, and relocate staff primarily to Manchester and Leeds. The site employs 601 people, spanning BT’s business division, Openreach staff, government-outsourced 999 call handlers and Relay UK workers who enable deaf and hard-of-hearing people to use the phone.
The company says lease renewal costs have risen to the point where maintaining a presence is not feasible, and that the closure is part of a long-running programme of modernising and consolidating its estate. Consultation began on 20 July. Affected staff are offered relocation.
Justin Madders, the MP for Ellesmere Port and Bromborough, has joined a joint letter to chief executive Allison Kirkby alongside Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram, Liverpool City Council leader Liam Robinson, Wirral Council leader Paula Basnett, Angela Eagle and Kim Johnson, asking BT to pause and explore alternatives. Madders points to greater flexibility on remote and hybrid working where roles allow, and to reports that BT stands to receive a windfall of over £2 billion across the next decade from selling copper recovered as it upgrades the network. One Labour councillor called the plan redundancy by stealth, on the grounds that many staff will leave rather than commute.
That councillor is describing the mechanism correctly, and it is the mechanism that matters here.
A relocation offer looks generous on paper and functions as a filter in practice. Some people will move. Most people with a mortgage in Wirral, a school run in Bootle or a partner working in Liverpool will not add three hours a day to their lives, and BT will record their departures as voluntary. The headcount reduction happens without a redundancy programme, which is presumably why estates decisions and workforce decisions are so frequently the same decision wearing different clothes.
Now the part almost never counted.
Six hundred people in a city-centre office building are not six hundred jobs. They are six hundred lunches, five days a week, roughly two hundred and forty days a year. They are the queue at the sandwich bar at half twelve and the second coffee at three. They are the reason the little place on the corner can justify a second member of staff, and the reason the barber two doors down opens at eight.
None of those businesses appear anywhere in BT’s lease arithmetic, and they should not be expected to. No company can be asked to keep a floor open to protect a cafe. But the cost is real, it lands entirely on parties who had no say, and it is why cities fight these decisions with letters rather than spreadsheets. The spreadsheet only contains the building.
The hybrid point Madders raises is the genuinely interesting one, because it changes the question from whether jobs exist to where the people holding them spend their daylight. A role that can be done from a home in Liverpool keeps its salary in the Liverpool economy even with no office at all. The current proposal does the opposite: it keeps the work and exports the worker.
What is being defended here is not the building on Old Hall Street. It is a daytime population, and daytime population is the thing a city centre economy is actually made of.
Six hundred desks. One lease. A street’s worth of tills.
Source: Chester Standard, “Ellesmere Port MP joins calls for rethink of BT job threat”
