GSK to downsize Harlow R&D site

GSK's R&D facility at Harlow, UK

GlaxoSmithKline is on the point of making the first job cuts in a round of redundancies designed to save £500 million in the next two years.

It has not taken long to flesh out the company’s announcement last week that some staff would have to go.

But a GSK spokeswoman dismissed as “media speculation” reports that 380 posts will be lost at its depression research centre in Harlow, Essex.

That would suggest slashing a third of the workforce in Harlow. “We haven’t confirmed the figure,” she told Pharmafocus, adding: “The site absolutely will not close but we are proposing that it would be downsized.”

Announcing GSK’s 2009 results recently the company’s chief executive Andrew Witty said “I don’t like to see anybody leave the organisation or for there to be any job losses.”

“But the reality is that we do from time to time need to look at ways we can improve our probabilities of success.”

GSK is putting its fixed R&D costs under the microscope after Witty called buildings a “hangover of the creation of the modern R&D industry in the 1980s”.

He said that R&D today tended to be “more virtual, more partnership-oriented”.

The company is also taking its leave of research areas deemed to be less productive.

Neuroscience, pain and depression have all been earmarked by GSK as areas the company might step back from.

“Part of the [Harlow] workforce actually do research in some of these areas,” the GSK spokeswoman confirmed.

A consultation on redundancies is in progress and it will affect sites in this country and the rest of the world.

“There are other sites where we’re going through the consultation process,” she added.

In addition to Harlow, GSK has UK locations in Stevenage, Welwyn, Beckenham, Tonbridge and Ware.

GSK’s annual profit rose last year to £8.4 billion on the back of a 3% sales rise to £28.3 billion.