Property firm axings

Property consultants Cushman&Wakefield which employs 700 people is reported to be making 80 sales and letting staff redundant in its UK business.

In one of the biggest City culls Merrill Lynch and its new owner, Bank of America, are planning to make almost 2000 people redundant in London.

New waves of redundancies all over the UK come on top of more bad news for Gordon Brown: the Tories have now opened up a double digit lead over Labour.

A poll for The Times shows that the Tories have risen four points to 43 per cent while Labour has dropped two points slipping to 33 per cent. The main reason would appear to be that the electorate is unhappy at the way Brown and Darling have managed the banking crisis and their decision to pump in £50 million of taxpayers money.

On top of the Merrill Lynch axings another 2000 jobs are going in newspaper, retail, food and the haulage industries. They range from 367 jobs at Waterford Wedgwood the china and glass maker to Waterstones the book group who are making 200 people redundant The East Anglian Daily Times newspaper at Ipswich part of the Archant group has axed 25 editorial people. Wincanton, the logistics company, is cutting 1000 jobs in Manchester and Gloucester. Digger maker JCB has cut 700 jobs because of the building and construction slump and because those customers it has cannot get credit facilities.

More redundancies are expected at Land of Leather. It collapsed on Monday jeopardising over 1000 jobs. It has 109 stores. Last year the High Street was rocked by The Pier, Rosebys, ScS and MFI all going under. More major High Street failures are inevitable.

Lord Mandelson the government business boss will announce that the government will underwrite loans of up to £1 million to little and medium sized companies. Darling has promised £1 bn would be spent on the scheme with another £1bn being pumped in to help small exporters. The moves are part of a package of measures to get banks lending again.

Unemployment in the UK is running at 1.86 million people and the figure is rising daily. A figure of 3million unemployed is being forecast by the end of 2009.