MATHEW HORSMAN

Media Editor
International CableTel, Britain’s third largest cable operator, is paying pounds 235m for NTL, the leading commercial broadcast services provider, as a step toward creating a truly national telecommunications network.The move will bring together NTL’s national transmission operations and CableTel’s local fibre-optic cables, which provide 57,000 homes with cable TV and telephony. “We see the Antrim plant at the forefront of our strategy to treble our VCR market share in Europe and to expand sales into the Russian republics.”Meanwhile, another 230 jobs are being created by YG-1 at an pounds 8.5m plant to manufacture precision cutting tools in west Belfast.. She said it was “an extremely important” investment because it reduced the Antrim plant’s dependence on components from Korea.The company, which set up in Northern Ireland in 1989, expects to employ 1,000 by December.KH Nam, vice-president of Daewoo, said the Northern Ireland facility was one of the group’s main overseas investments. RUSSELL HOTTEN

Almost 1,000 jobs are being created in Wales and Northern Ireland after the insurance giant Legal & General and two South Korean companies yesterday unveiled expansion plans.
Legal & General said that it would recruit about 400 people over the next three years for a new sales and advice centre being set up in Cardiff.

The company, which declined to reveal how much it was investing, had considered sites in North-east England and Surrey.The decision was welcomed by the Welsh Development Agency as an “important milestone” in achieving their target of creating 10,000 new jobs in finance and commerce.More than 560 new jobs are on their way to Northern Ireland following investments of more than pounds 23m by South Korean companies Daewoo and the YG-1 Tool Company.Daewoo is creating 330 jobs by the end of the year in a pounds 14.8m expansion, with Government-backing, of video recorders and deck mechanisms production at its plant in Antrim.The expansion was announced by Northern Ireland Economy Minister, Baroness Denton, during a visit to the company headquarters in South Korea. “We propose to establish a Monetary Policy Board that will include members from the City and from industry in order to reflect views from different parts of the country.”Yesterday’s winners and losersDestructionUnited Utilities 1,700Bank of England 150Office for National Statistics 200Calor* n/aBritish Rail 58CreationLegal & General 400Daewoo 330YG-1 230*300 warned of redundancies to come. The Bank said it intended to eliminate costly duplication between its own arrangements for processing, storing and distributing banknotes and those of the commercial banks. This should save around pounds 4m per year, but will be partly offset by the pounds 1m per year costs of the regional agencies.Alastair Darling, Labour’s City spokesman, said it was essential that the Bank of England maintained its economic intelligence units in the English region as as well as in Wales, Scotland and northern Ireland.”We want to broaden the basis on which the Bank of England formulates the advice that it gives to the Chancellor on interest rate policy,” he said.

“I want official statistics to be more widely available and more widely used, not just by businesses and analysts but by ordinary people,” he said.A Bank of England spokesman said the move was being made because the high street banks had taken on much of the work in distributing banknotes previously. Offices will be maintained in these cities for monitoring ecomonic trends and new ones will be opened in Cardiff and Nottingham, taking the total around the country to 12.The newly formed Office for National Statistics said it would shed up to 200 jobs in the coming year as it merges staff at the Central Statistics Office and the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys.Tim Holt , ONS chief exeutive said he wanted its statistics to be more user-friendly and readily available as well as preserving individual privacy. In May the Powerhouse chain, which was jointly owned by Eastern, Midland and Southern, was put on the market.Following Eastern’s takeover by Hanson, some 200 of the outlets were sold to the management and another 200 were closed.. JOHN EISENHAMMER

Financial Editor
Three hundred and fifty jobs were lost yesterday in the public services financial sector as the Bank of England and the National Statistics Office announced cost-saving exercises.The Bank said it was closing four regional note-handling centres at a cost of 150 jobs over the next 12 to 18 months as part of a shake-up of its system for distributing banknotes.Cash handling will cease at Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Newcastle, and in future the issuing of bank notes and the disposal of old ones will only be handled at the Bank of England branches in London and Leeds. He joined Norweb in 1992 and was previously a board director at Comet.The electrical retail sector is rapidly consolidating into a few major players led by Dixons (which also owns Currys) and Comet, part of the Kingfisher group.A year ago East Midlands Electricity and Yorkshire sold their Homepower joint venture South West and web Manweb gave up the fight in April. Most are in the North West though it has 18 superstores in the South West after it’s purchase last year of some of Swalec’s outlets.The most likely candidate to buy the stores is the company’s management led by Peter McTague, the group’s retail director. The Rumbelows chain also closed a year ago blaming mounting losses for the decision.Only a handful of the regional electricity companies, including Seeboard, Northern and Scottish Hydro are still battling on Only Scottish Power is still expanding aggressively.

Most have been making substantial losses and have either sold or closed large parts of their operation.Norweb’s electrical division is unusual in that it was making profits – pounds 8m last year on sales of pounds 207m It has 90 high street stores and 67 out of town superstores. The planned divestments, which the group said could take some time to achieve, could cull a further 10 per cent.The move was broadly welcomed among City analysts. But some warned that United still faces the uncertainty of price control reviews at the end of the decade by two watchdogs, Ofwat and Offer. According to one analyst:”There is not much to get worked up about here except what appears to be a strategic decision to retrench into the core utility operations.” The group’s shares moved up 14p to 611p.Separately, Calor Group yesterday warned of redundancies to come, and British Rail’s engineering development unit announced job losses.Calor, Britain’s biggest supplier of bottled gas, warned more than 300 workers at its Slough headquarters, close to London, that there would be redundancies following a decision to close the office by next year. The move forms part of a plan to redistribute head office functions between existing regional offices and a new customer management centre to be established this year near Leamington Spa in Warwickshire.The company refused to give further details ahead of a preliminary results announcement due this morning, but the business is known to be facing difficulties.British Rail’s engineering development unit is to close by the autumn with the loss of 58 jobs. BR had hoped to sell the Derby-based unit, which specialises in development of prototype rail vehicles.Comment, page 25.

NIGEL COPE

The decision by United Utilities to sell Norweb’s electrical retail interests makes it the latest in a long list of the privatised utilities to abandon the cut- throat market.
Eight electricity companies have now pulled the plug on their electrical stores in the last 12 months, as pressure to deliver value for shareholders forces tough decisions on peripheral activities. Gearing at the end of the year will be 90 per cent, rising to 100 per cent next year but quickly falling back to between 75 and 80 per cent. United also intends to pull out of power generation, an activity inherited from Norweb, which the new ownership feels is too small to be “meaningful”.United also hinted that it might seek further acquisitions in its drive to be a super-utility. The company said: “Ways are being explored of extending the group’s utility activities into Europe whilst at the same time watching with interest the continued rationalisation in Europe.”The group said that the savings from the Norweb merger would be pounds 140m a year by the end of the decade, about 40 per cent more than had been originally thought.Earnings enhancement in 1996/97 will also exceed expectations and real dividend growth of 11 per cent per annum is “possible”.United will make a provision of pounds 104m this year, largely to cover severance costs. The best people across both businesses will go forward with the group.”The job cuts in the core businesses emerged alongside plans to dispose of the group’s retail, contracting and process equipment divisions, which employ about 4,000 in the UK and elsewhere.