The Co-operative has brought 36 IT roles back in-house following its acquisition last year of supermarket chain Somerfield. The roles relate to helpdesk and store systems support, as the company opts to re-create jobs previously outsourced by Somerfield.

According to reports, 613 of the original 1,022 employees working at Somerfields Bristol headquarters, have already left, with most of the remaining staff expected to leave by Christmas. The Co-operative began its plans to close the Somerfield headquarters over a year ago in order to deliver cost savings.

Director of information systems food retail Mark Hale insisted that the grocery chain’s IT department will not be hit by the plans:

“What happened within Somerfield was that the vast majority of IT functions were outsourced to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which left a fairly small retained team of about 18 people. We’ve decided to take a number of services back in-house and so we’ve created some new roles.

“We’ve actually created a number of roles and brought a number of those jobs back from TCS into Manchester,”

Hale explained that Somerfield used a totally outsourced approach to IT, whereas Co-op had been selectively outsourcing IT functions, depending on where it could see value in outsourcing.

“We decided that our model of selective outsourcing is the model we wanted to use moving forwards, rather than a total outsource,” said Hale.

"We reviewed the cost. Our cost model was, broadly speaking, the same as Somerfield if not slightly better, and we didn't see any benefit of going down the total outsourcing model route."