12:00pm Saturday 4th September 2010
By Gareth Lewis
IT’S a decision that ends more than one and a half centuries of history and will cost 38 Hampshire jobs.
For the first time, national mapping agency Ordnance Survey (OS), which has been based in Southampton for more than 160 years, has signed a deal that will see its maps printed and distributed by outside firms.
Its iconic maps will be printed in Somerset and stored and distributed from Nottingham.
The four-year contracts, together worth £15m, mean 38 Southampton staff have been told their jobs are under threat.
Unions expressed “sadness and anger” at the end of an era and attacked the savings as “tiny”.
OS bosses signed a deal with Frome printers Butler Tanner and Dennis worth up to £10m to print around 2.3 million copies a year of its 620 different maps.
Meanwhile a warehousing and distribution deal was signed with Nottingham-based Promotional Logistics, which is worth £5m.
Both deals run until 2014.
OS, which is poised to move from its current Romsey Road base to new headquarters alongside the M271 at Nursling, said all workers under threat would have the chance to move with their jobs.
In total it employs about 1,100 people.
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