Up to a quarter of furniture jobs to go in Devizes and Bromham (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Up to a quarter of furniture jobs to go in Devizes and Bromham

11:45am Thursday 28th May 2009 in

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A quarter of the workforce at luxury furniture companies Smallbone of Devizes and Mark Wilkinson Furniture are to be made redundant.

Up to 100 jobs are to be lost the new owner of the companies, Leo Caplan, announced last week.

Mr Caplan, owner of the Canburg Group, bought the two companies in March after the Smallbone Group ran into financial trouble.

He said at the time that he could not rule out redundancies.

Now he has said that due to a reduced sales forecast for both Smallbone and Mark Wilkinson the production and administrative functions of the two brands would be rationalised on to one site to minimise duplication and reduce costs.

Mr Caplan said: “After a thorough strategic review of both Smallbone and Mark Wilkinson we have had to take the tough but necessary decision to rationalise our core functions of manufacturing and administration. This immediate action will secure the future for most of our employees and ensure that we continue to be a household name in British design and manufacturing.”

The two companies employs a total of 437 staff nationally. Smallbone employs about 129 people at its Hopton Industrial Estate site while about 200 people work at Mark Wilkinson in Bromham.

In Bromham the company has a showroom and office in the High Street, a factory in Jockey Lane and a factory in The Common. A worker at Mark Wilkinson said: “We feel somewhat let down that jobs are to go but at the same time we saw it coming a long time ago. There’s a feeling of resignation about the place, people are fed up and want to know if they are the ones to lose their jobs.”

He thought up to half of the jobs will be lost in Bromham.

A worker at Smallbone said: “We are just worried for our jobs especially as people were made redundant at Smallbone last year, although I understand that workers at Mark Wilkinson are more worried than we are.”

Canburg, the owner of Smallbone and Mark Wilkinson Furniture, confirmed that it had looked at the Gibsons Food factory at Hopton as a possible site.

A spokesman for Canburg said the landlord of the Gibsons factory had approached the company and officials had looked round it.

She said the factory is one of a number of options that Canburg is considering along with the Smallbone factory at Hopton and the Mark Wilkinson sites at Bromham.

Mark Wilkinson Furniture is the largest employer in Bromham. Parish council chairman Peter Paget said: “We are devastated by the news. We are hoping that not too many Bromham people will lose their jobs.”

Devizes Jobcentre is advertising 1,000 job vacancies. Most of them are in care, catering, cleaning, sales and administration.