A raft of redundancies was announced to employees at Polestar Bicester (formerly BGP) and Polestar Stones in Banbury (formerly Stones the Printers) yesterday.

The group has entered into a 30-day consultation over the cuts, which are understood to involve a range of roles across the two companies.

Stones managing director Steve Palmer has left the business with immediate effect, and the existing ten-strong salesforce at Bicester will be reduced to just two.

PrintWeek understands that 16 jobs in all are going at Stones and 32 at Bicester, just under 10% of the total workforce of circa 518.

Polestar is also following a growing trend by proposing to make staged redundancy payments over a number of months, rather than a lump sum.

Unite national officer Steve Sibbald said the union would not be involved in the process, except with individual members: "We have members there but we don't have recognition anymore," he said. "It was obvious the sales team would be the first to get chopped. Now we'll wait and see what they're going to do about capacity."

When Polestar acquired the assets of BGP and Stones in a pre-pack deal at the end of last month, chief executive Barry Hibbert said the group intended to continue with firms in their current form but "some changes will be inevitable".

The group declined to comment further at the time of writing.