Staff at BHS in Huddersfield will lose their jobs in the next few weeks as administrators set out a timetable for winding down the business.
The store at The Shambles, which employs about 60 people, will close its doors for good by August 20 at the latest.
The employees are among more than 11,000 BHS workers being made redundant after the department store chain collapsed into administration in April.
Administrators from Duff & Phelps closed 20 stores on Saturday, affecting 580 staff, and will shut a further 30 shops this coming Saturday, affecting another 700 employees. BHS had 164 stores prior to its collapse.
Staff across the remaining 114 stores – including Huddersfield – were formally notified on Monday that their jobs are going into redundancy consultation, with all stores to be closed by August 20.
The loss of the Huddersfield store is a major blow to the town. The store occupies the second-largest unit at the Piazza Shopping Centre – behind Boots – and accounts for about a fifth of total trading space at the centre.
Others to close by August 20 include BHS branches in Leeds, Wakefield and Sheffield.
Duff & Phelps has failed to sell the business as a going concern and will now look to break it up piecemeal.
The news came on the day that a damning report into BHS’s ownership under retail billionaire Sir Philip Green was released.
The tycoon was branded the “unacceptable face of capitalism” as a parliamentary inquiry found he systematically extracted huge sums from the collapsed store group while leaving its pension fund in deficit.
Sir Philip and his family pocketed £400m in dividends during his 15-year ownership of the company, with BHS’s pension scheme nursing a £571m deficit when it fell into administration.
In a hard-hitting joint report, two Commons select committees accused the entrepreneur of seeking to blame anyone but himself for the firm’s failure and said he has a “moral duty” to make a “large financial contribution” to the 20,000 pensioners facing substantial cuts to their benefits.
While the committees were damning about Dominic Chappell, who bought BHS for £1 from the billionaire last year, and the “directors, advisers and hangers-on” associated with the deal, they said ultimate responsibility lay with Sir Philip.
