About 1,100 BT staff in Bristol are waiting to hear if they are part of plans to axe 15,000 jobs across the firm.

The cuts, largely due to BT's poorly performing global services division, are on top of 10,000 redundancies previously announced in November.

The latest round of 15,000 job losses, mainly in the UK, represent ten per cent of BT's global workforce of 150,000.

BT has staff in three offices in Bristol city centre and a base in Horfield.

BT's global services unit, which handles the network systems of large firms, has struggled in the last year due to the credit crunch and contributed to a loss for BT of £134 million.

BT said it hoped to remove the 15,000 jobs through natural wastage and voluntary redundancies, and added that it did not have plans for compulsory lay-offs.

A BT spokesman said: "Our aim is to work closely with the unions to reduce BT's total labour cost, of both direct and indirect staff, as this is critical to the success of the company going forward."

Andy Kerr, deputy general secretary at the Communication Workers' Union, said he hoped there would not be any compulsory redundancies.

"We have worked closely with the company over the last year to make sure there were no compulsory redundancies in the company,"

"We did it last year and the commitments have worked so far, as there's certainly no plans for compulsory redundancies for this year coming."

BT also admitted it has paid £525 million into its pension fund, which has a deficit of £2.9 billion.

In October, it increased in the retirement age from 60 to 65 and breaking the link between final salaries and pension payments to combat the problem.