Yeovil's biggest employer has secured a new contract with the Ministry of Defence worth a quarter of a billion pounds, the Western Gazette can exclusively reveal.

AgustaWestland, which employs around 3,600 UK workers, has won a £250-million contract to provide the support and training for a new fleet of Army and Navy Lynx Wildcat helicopters over the next five years, according to sources.

The helicopters are currently in construction at the firm’s Lysander Road factory.

MP for Yeovil, David Laws, said: “If this news is confirmed, this would be a huge boost to AgustaWestland and to the economy of Yeovil and south Somerset. At the end of 2011 there was a lot of gloomy news in terms of local redundancies in the defence sector.

“If this contract is secured then it would help to protect and sustain hundreds of jobs in our area over the next five years and beyond.”

In October, AgustaWestland announced it was to shed up to 375 jobs, weeks after news broke of 132 planned redundancies at BAE Systems in Yeovil and 124 naval job losses at RNAS Yeovilton.

Last month, a company spokesman said that thanks to a large number of requests for voluntary redundancy, the number of people that would have to be forced out had been reduced to 116.

Those redundancies are still expected to go ahead, despite this new deal.

Manufacturing of the AW159 aircraft, also known as the Lynx Wildcat or Future Lynx, began after a £1-billion defence contract was signed in 2006.

This new deal will result in AgustaWestland staff training the military pilots who will use the new helicopters.

The company is also working on a MoD contract to build a new £76-million training centre for the helicopters which will be located at RNAS Yeovilton, alongside Royal Navy and British Army AW159 Lynx Wildcat squadron.

The state-of-the-art facility will incorporate two full mission simulators, a flight training device and cockpit procedures trainer.

Training courses for the Army are due to commence at the centre from January 2013, and for the Navy in the following year.

The original deal was to manufacture 70 helicopters but that figure was reduced to 63 in 2009 following Government spending cuts.

The contract came under public scrutiny at a time when the Ministry of Defence had to make massive savings.

The AW159 aircraft is said to be more advanced, have better defences and firepower than its Lynx predecessor.

Although the new aircraft looks similar to the Lynx – with the exception of its distinctive tailplane which improves the helicopter’s stability – Wildcat’s characteristics are sufficiently different from Lynx to warrant extensive flight trials, setting the parameters within which it can safely operate.

The AW159’s primary role in Army guise is battlefield reconnaissance while for the Royal Navy it is designed to carry out surface combat.

But it will also be able perform a wide range of other tasks, emulating the versatility of its predecessor.

And like the Lynx, it has been designed to be able to accommodate future demands of the Armed Forces.

A prototype of the Wildcat boarded a warship in the English Channel in 2010 to see how it would cope at sea in bad weather.

The Wildcat is expected to be fully operational for the Army in 2014 and the Navy in 2015.