British Airways will press ahead with cutbacks that could result in 12,000 job losses, Willie Walsh, the chief executive of its parent company has said, despite the government’s extension of the furlough scheme. In a letter to the chair of the transport committee, Huw Merriman, Walsh said government pay support would not compensate for “the reality of a structurally changed airline industry in a severely weakened global economy”. “I want to confirm, therefore, that we will not pause our consultations or put our plans on hold,” the International Airlines Group chief said. Walsh’s letter is an apparent response to Merriman’s call in the Commons and on Twitter this week for BA to “put these redundancy plans back in the hold where they belong”. The extension of the wage subsidy scheme announced by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, on Tuesday was intended to pull employers back from a “cliff edge” after which they would be forced to make redundancies. But Walsh has since said the extension only bought IAG “a few extra days”. He also repeated his criticism of Boris Johnson’s 14-day quarantine plans, saying: “The prime minister’s decision to quarantine people arriving in the UK, by air, and the health secretary’s comments that it was unlikely that ‘big, lavish international holidays’ were going to be possible this summer, have seriously set back recovery plans for our industry.” On Monday, a group of aviation bosses including the chief executives of Heathrow, Gatwick and easyJet wrote to Johnson to question the feasibility and scientific basis of the plan. Walsh wrote to Merriman after appearing at a virtual evidence session of the transport committee on the same day. In response to a request for information on BA’s progress in refunding passengers who could not fly owing to the pandemic, Walsh said the airline had processed 921,000 refunds and still had 47,400 to get through. He said customers agreed to swap 346,000 bookings for vouchers, of which 1,700 are still being processed.