Thousands of job losses were announced across the country today with West Midlands firms among those shedding staff.

Eighty-five workers at Cannock engineering firm ThyssenKrupp Tallent will lose their jobs.

While around 36 posts face the axe at Walsall forging firm EMS Cerro.

BAE Systems is shedding 200 jobs in its land systems business in the UK, with its factory in Telford affected, and Rolls-Royce plans to cut up to 2,000 jobs worldwide, including 140 in the UK at assembly and test facility in Derby.

Anglo-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca is also to cut 1,400 jobs as part of a programme to improve efficiency, with its plant in Cheshire affected.

Bosses at ThyssenKrupp Tallent in Wolverhampton Road plant, which supplies parts to the car industry, said the cuts would involve both voluntary and compulsory redundancies.

The German-owned company has seen a dramatic fall in business as car sales have plummeted around the world. Staff were told the jobs will go by December 19 after a consultation with the workforce.

Bosses at EMS Cerro, in Goscote Lane, say the cost-cutting measures will guarantee the long-term survival of the country’s last remaining non-ferrous forgers.

They say they are currently in talks with union representatives and will try to shed the posts through voluntary redundancies. Some 265 workers are employed by the firm across its Walsall site of 53 years and its main production base in Liverpool Street, Birmingham, with job losses split across the two sites.

BAE, meanwhile, blamed the cuts on a decline in workload on the Ministry of Defence’s Armoured Fighting Vehicle programmes.