Rolls-Royce, the aerospace engineer, has announced further job cuts of between 1,500 and 2,000 around the world during next year, with 140 earmarked to go at its assembly and test facility in Derby.

The redundancies bring the number of jobs lost by British companies since last Wednesday to more than 22,000 worldwide. Rolls-Royce has largely completed a round of 2,300 job cuts announced in January for 2008.

The company is the latest leading British company to impose heavy job losses, following BT last week, which is letting 10,000 people go, Royal Bank of Scotland, which is cutting 3,000 jobs, GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical giant, which said it was closing a factory in Kent with the loss of 620 jobs, and Virgin Media, which is cutting 2,000 jobs over the next four years.

The building industry has seen more than 10,000 jobs cut, with Wolseley, the latest construction products company to say earlier this week that it was cutting an additional 2,000 jobs, on top of previous headcount reductions.

Unemployment has surged to an 11-year high as the recession tightens its grip on Britain.

In October the number of people out of work grew by 140,000 to 1.82 million. The number of people claiming jobseekers' allowance was the ninth successive increase and the biggest monthly jump in 16 years. Economists now forecast that the total will soar to more than one million next month.

Rolls-Royce said that it was in talks with employee representatives about the losses at Derby. It has yet to decide where the rest of the redundancies will take place.

Rolls-Royce said the 2009 job cuts represented four per cent of its total workforce of 39,000 people.

Sir John Rose, the chairman of Rolls Royce, said it was too early to determine the precise effects of the global economic downturn and cancelled orders on the group's business.

"However, we wanted to give all our employees an early indication of the likely scale of the job reductions we expect in 2009."

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