Cattles Closes Offices And Makes Redundancies
Just when things were starting to look slightly more positive for the loan industry in general, there was more bad news for those individuals working in the secured loan industry earlier this week, as Cattles announced that it was planning to close 30 of its financial services branches and offices across the UK, with the very high likelihood of job losses and redundancies.
Cattles is the parent company of Welcome finance, who were one of the largest providers of secured loans for direct customer s and loan brokers alike, until they withdrew from the secured loan market altogether last year, due to the impact of the credit crunch on its business. This in turn led to several directors being sacked due to accounting irregularities and bad management.
The branch closures are all Welcome finance offices, where the lease on the property has either expired, or is about to expire. Cattles have said that the 30 closures reflect the reduction in the number of loans offered and therefore a reduction in the number of staff required to adequately maintain the company’s sales and support teams. It is expected that there will be somewhere in the region of 510 jobs lost at the firm and Cattles are entering a consultation process with those staff who will be affected.
The new management team at Cattles are trying to restructure the company in order for it to survive the current difficult economic conditions and it believes that the current closures and redundancies are necessary in order to bring the firm in line with the dramatic reduction in the number of new loans being offered.
Margaret Young of Cattles said “These proposed changes are central to Cattles achieving a more cost efficient business model which mirrors current levels of lending activity. Cattles is in constructive discussions with its key financial creditors to obtain a standstill agreement.”
