Over 300 redundancies at Tarmac Building Products
LAST week Tarmac Building Products announced that 310 staff are to loose their jobs and several block and mortar plants are to be mothballed as part of a rationalization and restructuring of the business brought about by the current slump in the residential construction market.
The job cuts, which represent around 12% of the company’s workforce, follow a 30–35% year-on-year reduction in market demand, a situation which the company says is likely to get worse before it gets better.
‘The speed with which this fall-off in demand has happened is very worrying,’ said Tarmac Building Products director Clive James. ‘Nobody was forecasting this back in December, yet here we are in July facing deep reductions in demand for some of our products. This has left us with no choice but to slim down the business.’
Tarmac Topblock plants are being be mothballed in Cambridge and Linford, in Essex, and staff numbers are being reduced at Hilton Mains, in Staffordshire, and Ninfield in East Sussex. Topblock sales offices in Durham, Ford, Newark and Hilton Main are also being closed, with the sales activities being absorbed into Tarmac’s head office in Wolverhampton.
In addition, staff levels are being reduced at Tarmac’s Topfloor operation in Lound, and mortar plants in Cambridge, Coventry, Northampton and Middlesbrough are being mothballed.
The job losses from all these operations amount to 180 in total, but a further 130 staff are being made redundant with the closure the Kirkby precast plant, in Nottinghamshire, as part of a wider business review planned before the
‘We’ve got very good geographical coverage, so we are able to absorb these changes into other plants,’ explained Mr James. ‘We remain committed to supplying our markets and our customers, but will do so from fewer plants and by travelling the products further.’
Commenting on the job losses, Mr James said that, while no one was happy about the situation, the general reaction to the redundancy announcements had been one of understanding. ‘I think people were expecting it,’ he said. ‘They can see for themselves what’s happening all around them and they know our business is highly dependent on the residential construction sector, so they knew something had to be done.’
He added that the rate of decline in the residential sector had happened so quickly, his worry now was whether the same thing might happen in other sectors. ‘Government finances are not particularly strong at present, so the concern is that the same thing could happen with infrastructure and commercial work,’ he said.
‘But my main concern at present, and one of the reasons why I don’t think we’ve reached the bottom yet, is that the current fall-off in demand is coinciding with a significant increase in costs (power, cement etc) over which we have no control and the scale of which businesses such as ours cannot continue to absorb.
‘The big challenge facing us now is how can companies in the sector hope to recover these costs while competing in a market that is shrinking. With power costs in particular, it is absolutely vital that the Government does something to help reduce the impact,’ he said.
