EDS has told its staff that it plans to make up to 250 job cuts by the end of this month.

A spokesman for the outsourcing firm confirmed to The Register that company bosses met with trade union representatives last Friday to talk about a limited voluntary redundancy plan during January as part of its "ongoing restructuring and re-skilling programme".

The company has pinpointed 2,782 UK jobs that include 1,508 positions at its data centre division, where staff can apply for voluntary redundancy.

However, the spokesman insisted that the actual number of lay-offs would total "the low hundreds" and that EDS would look at "individual cases on their merit".

When asked why so many people had been given the option of voluntary redundancy, he explained that "to achieve the right number of redundancies you have to reach out to a much larger group. But if we're looking at a total figure it's probably around 200-250 people".

He added: "EDS has invested very significant sums in re-skilling and we do that because we have absolute faith in both our commercial and public sector market place and we believe the UK will be a very strong market place for us moving forward."

Public and Commercial Services (PCS) and Unite, formerly Amicus, union reps were given a deadline of 15 January for members to submit "expressions of interest" to leave EDS under the redundancy plan, with the clear-out expected to be completed by the end of this month.

However, in a bulletin to union members, PCS national officer Jim Hanson said he was unclear about how many voluntary pay-outs were likely to be approved by EDS management.

EDS holds a number of key public sector IT contracts with the likes of the Department for Work and Pensions and the Military of Defence and has some 15,000 staff based in the UK. ®