We are committed to delivering excellent service to our customers at a reasonable cost. Inevitably, this commitment affects how we resource our business, and sometimes involves redundancies. But when this happens, we appreciate the human side and take care to minimise the impact. We plan carefully and get people involved as soon as we can – and when job loss is unavoidable, we do our best to help people find new roles.

For example, Norwich Union will be reducing headcount by 4,000 by 2008, but intends to hold on to as many skills as possible through redeployment, either at Norwich Union UK or within the wider Aviva UK group. Those who do leave the business are offered specialist outplacement advice to help them find jobs elsewhere. Staff representative bodies are part of a formal consultation process during this time of change. In addition, we have set aside 2.5m to help people affected with specialised career advice and retraining where appropriate – including two special Enterprise Funds in Norwich and York to support displaced employees who want to set up their own business. View Norwich Union's business report for further details.

We work in a demanding marketplace and, to help us stay competitive, offshoring is a key element in our strategy. Our target, in line with plans announced in 2005, is to have 7,800 employees offshore by the end of 2007, and as part of that we are moving around 1,000 customer services, finance and IT roles over to India and Sri Lanka.

Major restructuring also affected recruitment and retention following the acquisition of AmerUs Group in the US, so we helped people to find new roles, but also took steps to encourage people who were still needed to stay on.

Our open and honest approach to helping people to adapt to change also helped us to minimise the impact of restructuring in Australia and in a joint venture with Allied Irish Bank in Ireland.