Arcadia to cut head office jobs as restructuring gets under way

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jun 14, 2019

Arcadia is moving fast following the approval of its CVA plan this week and it has now said it will cut 170 jobs at its head office. The company is “proposing to make some structural changes in order to support and deliver the turnaround plan.” It will aim to find jobs for the affected staff elsewhere in the organisation.

Had the CVA plan not been voted through, up to 18,000 jobs would have been at risk at the company that operates the Topshop/Topman, Wallis, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Burton and Dorothy Perkins chains.

The company employs 2,600 people at its head office and the job losses there will be followed by the closure of 23 shops in the UK and Ireland that will mean a further 520 jobs will be shed. However, it’s also expected that another raft of closures will follow, affecting another 500 jobs, under a separate process.

The axe isn’t expected to fall evenly across the business with some chains stronger than others. There are particular concerns at Miss Selfridge whose head office team is currently housed in the former HQ of BHS under a temporary lease.

Closures aren’t only affecting the domestic operations and Arcadia is also closing all 11 of its American Topshop stores and most of its Australian location.

The restructuring comes as company chief Sir Philip Green admitted this week in an interview that the business had not moved fast enough to adapt to the big changes happening in UK fashion retail.

“The marketplace… has fundamentally changed forever,” he said. “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. 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.”