JOBS are still on the line at the Cleveland Bridge works despite the Darlington firm winning contracts worth £1.2m for a major new Scottish oil field.

The company will make girders for platforms on the Encana (UK) Buzzard Field being developed in the North Sea.

Encana is planning to build three bridge-linked platforms as part of a programme to extract at least 400m barrel of oil from the field, 60 miles north-east of Aberdeen.

One contract is to produce 195 plate girders for Burntisland Fabricators in Fife and another is to fabricate 327 girders for Heerema Hartlepool.

Brian Rogan, deputy managing director of Cleveland Bridge UK, said: "The firm has recently been strengthening its experience in offshore fabrication, including work on BP Clair and Bonga Field FPSO for Amec Offshore.

"These new projects further illustrate our abilities and offer up to 25,000 man hours of work for the Darlington plant between now and September. We would hope that the development of this work will lead to more projects in the very near future, bringing further consolidation of this area of the business."

A spokeswoman for Cleveland Bridge, which is in consultation with unions over about 200 redundancies, said tenders were already in the pipeline before the company announced it would have to shed jobs because of a lack of major contracts.