SEVENTEEN staff at the Glasgow base of insurance firm esure have lost their jobs.

The call centre team leaders are understood to have been told yesterday that their positions were to be axed in a "stream-lining" operation.

A spokeswoman for esure said: "Seventeen staff have left us.

"Overall, we're still growing in Glasgow. This was a very small streamlining of jobs.

"This was planned and we have predicted that even before these people were lost, we will be growing in Glasgow in 2009."

"We are recruiting in Glasgow, we just have to recruit at the right level.

"Fifty per cent of our work force is in Glasgow. We currently have about 500 employees in the city and that number is expected to rise."

The company was made famous by Michael Winner's "Calm down, dear" TV ads and is now one of the UK's largest motor insurance providers.

Although the company underwrites the car insurance commitments for troubled bank HBoS, esure insist its operation is not threatened by the current global economic crisis.

Their spokeswoman added: "We are doing well in the current climate. Insurance isn't like banking. We're not subject to the same pressures as other people."