MOBILE phone operator Orange has begun issuing redundancies in the region as part of job cuts that will see between 200 and 300 staff shed across the UK.

An undisclosed number of technical staff at Orange's centre in Darlington have been told they are losing their jobs in a process that is expected to take until the New Year to complete.

The redundancies are expected to come from the group's network and technical systems operations, which have bases in Bristol and Manchester and which includes 86 staff at Darlington.

The company employs more than 5,000 workers in centres across the region at Peterlee, in County Durham, and at North Tyneside and Washington, in Wearside.

The company said because the affected staff worked across different departments within the business, the job cuts would be staggered over a period of several weeks.

A spokesman for Orange, which has 13,500 UK employees, said it was not possible to say how many staff in Darlington had lost their jobs.

The spokesman said: "The company is still in consultation with staff and because that process is taking place at a different pace across different areas of the business, we are not in a position at the moment to issue figures about the restructuring."

The planned redundancies were revealed in The Northern Echo three weeks ago.

The restructuring plan is only expected to result in a small number of redundancies in the North-East and Orange said the cuts would not affect call centre or shop staff.

France Telecom owns Orange and has operations in 19 countries.

The redundancies are part of a strategy the company announced about a year ago under former chief executive Sol Trujillo, who has since left the group.

Mr Trujillo set out plans to make the company's products more user-friendly and to increase usage of non-voice mobile phone services.

In February, Orange said it had boosted revenues by nine per cent last year to £12.25bn as a result of more customers signing up for its services.

As well as the 86 technical staff the company employs in Darlington, it also employs five in Washington, one in North Tyneside and one at its centre in Peterlee, along with thousands of customer service staff in the region.