// Head office will see 170 jobs lost
// Alongside roughly 1,000 employees set to lose their shopfloor jobs
// Arcadia to begin redundancy consultancy process next week
Arcadia will cut 170 staff from its head office alongside the 1,000 shop floor jobs caused by the closure of 50 stores in its portfolio.
Sir Philip Green’s hard-won restructure plan for Arcadia will mean 170 of its 2,600 employees at its head offices across its Topshop, Topman, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Burton and Dorothy Perkins brands will lose their contracts.
That’s on top of roughly 1,000 employees who will lose their jobs on the group’s shop floors.
The company voluntary agreement (CVA) that Arcadia’s landlords agreed on after prolonged discussions means the retailer avoids administration, which would have put a further 17,000 of its employees’ jobs at risk.
Next week Arcadia will enter a redundancy consultancy process, which is likely to last at least a month.
“Following yesterday’s CVA vote, as outlined, the group are proposing to make some structural changes in order to support and deliver the turnaround plan,” said Arcadia.
Arcadia added that it would try to find other roles in the group for those at risk.
On Thursday, Green defended claims that the CVA talks had been on a “knife-edge”.
“It didn’t come close to collapse. We won the vote. It was a legitimate vote, and it was won,” Green told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“The marketplace… has fundamentally changed forever. Whether we haven’t changed quickly enough or we had too many shops or whatever, I think it’s a combination of a lot of things,” Green told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday after his seven CVAs were approved.
“The answer is you can’t get it all right. For a long time the company made a lot of money. Literally only in the last couple of years it fell off,” he argued.
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