---
title: "Centrica cuts 1,300 jobs as British Gas goes digital and half-year profit slips"
description: "Centrica, the owner of British Gas, said it is cutting about 1,300 roles, roughly 14% of its customer-operations workforce, as more customers self-serve online and it drives costs down. It came alongside half-year results showing adjusted profit falling: EBITDA of £737 million, down from £900 million a year earlier, though the dividend rose 9%."
category: "Companies"
category_url: https://boursel.com/category/companies
author: "Marcus Feldman"
published: 2026-07-24T04:16:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-24T04:16:00.000Z
canonical: https://boursel.com/article/centrica-cuts-1-300-jobs-as-british-gas-goes-digital-and-half-year-profit-slips
tags: ["centrica", "british-gas", "earnings", "job-cuts"]
---
# Centrica cuts 1,300 jobs as British Gas goes digital and half-year profit slips

Centrica, the owner of British Gas, said it is cutting about 1,300 roles, roughly 14% of its customer-operations workforce, as more customers self-serve online and it drives costs down. It came alongside half-year results showing adjusted profit falling: EBITDA of £737 million, down from £900 million a year earlier, though the dividend rose 9%.

Centrica, the FTSE-100 energy group behind British Gas, paired a set of softer half-year results with a significant cost-cutting move: about 1,300 jobs are going, concentrated in the part of the business that answers customers' calls. The numbers come from the company's own [half-year financial report](https://www.investegate.co.uk/announcement/rns/centrica--cna/half-year-financial-report/9682988) for the six months to June 30.

## The job cuts

The headline for workers is blunt. Centrica said its transformation programme and "changing customer behaviour supporting more efficient operations" are driving "c.1,300 proposed role reductions," which it put at "c.14% reduction in customer operations workforce." Alongside that, it reported a 3% reduction in operating costs excluding bad debt and depreciation.

The company tied the change to how customers now interact with it. It is pushing digital-first channels, noting its British Gas membership scheme, launched in 2025, already has more than a million members, and it cited "lower inbound customer contact", fewer people phoning up, as part of what makes a leaner customer-operations team possible. In other words, as more account-holders manage things online and through apps rather than by calling, the company needs fewer staff on the phones. It is the same automation-and-self-service pressure reshaping call centres across industries, now landing at one of Britain's best-known household brands.

## The profit picture

The results themselves were a story of adjusted profit sliding while the underlying business held steady. On the company's preferred adjusted measures, EBITDA came in at £737 million, down from £900 million in the first half of 2025, and adjusted operating profit was £497 million, against £549 million a year earlier. Adjusted earnings per share edged down to 6.8p from 7.0p.

Centrica attributed the decline "predominantly" to disposals of Spirit Energy assets and to production outages, in other words, to its upstream and infrastructure operations rather than to the British Gas retail arm, whose adjusted earnings actually rose slightly. Despite the softer profit, the company lifted its interim dividend 9%, to 2.0p a share from 1.83p, a signal of confidence in its cash generation.

## Why the "statutory" profit looks so different

There is a striking gap in this report worth pausing on, because it is a lesson in reading company accounts. On a statutory basis, the measure that follows standard accounting rules rather than the company's adjustments, Centrica reported operating profit of £710 million, a huge swing from a £69 million loss a year earlier, and statutory earnings per share of 11.7p versus a 5.1p loss.

How can statutory profit leap while adjusted profit falls? The answer is roughly £0.2 billion of gains from "re-measurements of derivative energy contracts and reversal of impairments." Energy companies hedge with derivatives whose accounting value swings with market prices, and those paper swings flow through the statutory numbers even though they do not reflect the period's actual trading. This is exactly why companies report an "adjusted" figure, to strip out that volatility, and why the adjusted decline, not the statutory jump, is the better read on how the business actually performed.

## The bigger picture

Centrica's update captures two forces at once. The first is the reshaping of customer service: a large incumbent trimming its call-centre workforce as customers move online is a concrete example of how automation and self-service are changing headcount in service businesses, not just in tech. The second is the ordinary rhythm of an energy company's earnings, where asset sales and outages can pull reported profit around from one half to the next.

The company kept its longer-term ambitions unchanged, restating targets of £2.0 billion of adjusted EBITDA and a doubling of earnings per share by 2030. For now, though, the most tangible news is the 1,300 people whose roles are going as the business gets leaner. This is not investment advice, but Centrica's half-year is a reminder that a rising dividend and a shrinking workforce can sit in the same results statement, and that "efficiency" in a customer-facing giant increasingly means fewer people answering the phone.