STEELMAKER Corus last night confirmed it was cutting 75 jobs as part of an overhaul of the company.

The bloom casting operation at Teesside Cast Products (TCP), in Redcar, east Cleveland, will be phased out by the end of the year. Production will be moved to Corus' Scunthorpe site, where it has invested £130m in a modernisation programme.

The job losses are part of restructuring plans announced by the company in April 2003.

TCP, which employs 1,700 workers on Teesside, hopes most of the job losses will come through voluntary redundancy, while it will try and redeploy the rest elsewhere in its operations.

A TCP spokeswoman said: "We started consultation with the trade unions this morning. Hopefully, there will not be any compulsory redundancies."

Tony Poynter, chairman of the multi-union committee representing the steelworkers, said: "This is part of the survival plan for Teesside.

"It wasn't unexpected and, clearly, the people who work at that plant wanted to know what the final outcome would be."

Corus set up TCP as a stand-alone company after announcing in 2003 that Teesside would have to find its own market for the steel.

It was part of an overhaul by chief executive Philippe Varin, which saw the group move back into the black last year after five years of heavy losses.

Last December, TCP signed a deal with four global steel companies securing steel-making on Teesside for ten years.

Under the agreement, the companies will take 74 per cent of slab output from Redcar and Lackenby over the next decade.

The consortium is made up of Dongkuk, of South Korea, Duferco, of Switzerland, Mexican company Imsa and Italian strip products business Marcegaglia. The TCP spokeswoman said: "The agreement is for slab only, not bloom, so there is no need for bloom production on Teesside."

The redundancies will be phased, starting from the beginning of next month. Production at the site will cease in December.

The job losses follow an announcement by Corus in April that it was cutting 98 jobs at its Teesside beam mill.

Corus, formed from the merger of British Steel and Dutch company Hoogoevens in 1999, is investing £4.4m in machinery at the site.