A STRIKE ballot at The Daily Telegraph and its Sunday stablemate is expected next week, after management failed to withdraw plans to make 90 journalists redundant.

Union officials, who had imposed the deadline of noon yesterday, have begun the work for a ballot, which usually takes a week. However, they said they were prepared to abandon it if management put redundancy plans on hold and met staff.

Barry Fitzpatrick, a national organiser for the National Union of Journalists, said: “We are ready to drop our ballot if they withdraw the reference to 90 job cuts, although I have to say I’m not optimistic that will happen either.”

Last Friday Murdoch MacLennan, the chief executive of the Telegraph, announced plans to cut more than one job in six jobs. Volunteers will be sought, but compulsory cuts have not been ruled out.

Within hours NUJ members — estimated at a little over half the 521 editorial staff — agreed to hold a strike ballot if the threat was not dropped by noon yesterday. That deadline passed without any management climbdown.

The job cuts are intended to pay for £150 million of investment in new print sites.

The newspaper publisher is looking at investing in sites outside London — such as Oxford — rather than put more capital into the newspaper’s main press at Westferry in Docklands, East London.

Westferry is a joint venture between the Telegraph and Richard Desmond, the publisher of the Daily Express.