LEGAL & GENERAL TO CUT 1,000 JOBS BY MID-2027

Legal & General is to cut around 1,000 jobs, roughly a tenth of its workforce, by the middle of 2027, the insurance and pensions firm told staff by email on Wednesday. Chief executive António Simões said the reductions were needed to make L&G a "leaner organisation" after different structures and ways of working developed across the company over the past decade. The programme will initially involve voluntary redundancies in the UK, though L&G said it would consider mandatory job cuts depending on the take-up. Most of the firm's roughly 10,000 employees are based in the UK. The company's fund management division, which oversees £1.2 trillion in assets, is excluded because it has its own separate restructuring plan.

Simões took over as chief executive from Nigel Wilson in January 2024 and has since reduced the group's four business divisions to three by merging its asset management operations, alongside sharpening its focus on the pensions arm. He previously worked at Santander and HSBC. L&G has also sold a number of what it called "non-strategic" assets, including the housebuilder Cala Homes, along with legacy land and real estate holdings, and has brought in a new executive team. Simões has pledged to return more than £5 billion to shareholders between 2025 and 2027 through dividends and share buybacks.

An L&G spokesperson described the cuts as "the next stage" of the company's transformation, saying they would allow it to focus resources and investment on areas offering "the strongest opportunities for long-term growth". The announcement came separately from figures showing UK private sector employers have cut jobs every month for two years, according to a purchasing managers' index survey. L&G shares have risen 11.9 per cent since the start of the year to 293.3 pence, though the company has underperformed against rivals including Aviva and the wider market in recent years.