By Lars Niven

SOME 170 PEOPLE at the Rolls-Royce factory in Dalgety Bay are facing an uncertain future after the company announced it is to cut as many as 2000 jobs worldwide next year.

The news came on a day that top UK firms joined the growing list of companies cutting jobs with fears of more to follow.

Defence firm BAE Systems and Anglo-Swedish drug-maker AstraZeneca were the latest firms to unveil job cuts along with Rolls-Royce, with union leaders fearing fresh waves of redundancies.

Rolls-Royce, which employs 39,000 workers globally, 60% of whom are based in the UK, said the announcement was the first stage in a more general programme aimed at matching the group’s capacity more closely with the expected load in its plants.

In a statement issued to the Stock Exchange yesterday Rolls-Royce confirmed 140 workers at its assembly and test plant in Derby are to be made redundant.

The Derby site forms part of the group’s civil aerospace arm, unlike its factory in west Fife and the hope is Dalgety Bay can escape the worst of the cutbacks.

Just last month workers there celebrated the news that the company had won a slice of the £3.2 billion contract to build the Royal Navy’s next generation of aircraft carriers.

Rolls-Royce is to build parts of the engine and propulsion systems as well as the rudders and stabilisers for HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales at a cost of £96 million.

The Dalgety Bay factory will build the rudders and stabilisers, work worth £13 million.

The 65,000-tonne warships are the largest ordered by the Royal Navy and yesterday Dunfermline and West Fife MP Willie Rennie said he hoped the supercarrier work would secure jobs at the plant.

He said, “They have got some excellent engineers down there and a fantastic workforce that has proved itself over and over again, especially with the success of the supercarriers’ contract.

“I just hope that Dalgety Bay doesn’t get hit with these worldwide cuts.”

Mr Rennie was warned of the potential for job losses in a letter written by the company’s director of government relations, Josephine Cook.

She told him, “We are not yet in a position to be able to predict the precise implication for each location but as this becomes clearer, Rolls-Royce will enter into detailed consultations in the relevant locations.”

AstraZeneca said it planned to cut 1400 jobs and close three plants in Europe as part of a programme to improve efficiency, hitting 250 jobs at Macclesfield.

BAE Systems announced the loss of up to 200 jobs in its land systems business in the UK, hitting factories in Newcastle, Leeds, Leicester, Barrow and Telford.

The firm blamed a decline in workload for the Ministry of Defence.