500 job losses at SPEEDY HIRE the Merseyside based company.

Speedy Hire who employs over 5000 staff has announced large job losses as part a massive cost cutting exercise. The custs are hoped to save £24 000 000 per year.

October revenues were 6% down on expectations.

Despite this, pre-tax 1/2 year profits were up by 3.9%.

Chairman David wallis says he hope the future will be clearer after the Christmas shutdown.

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With the immense benefit of Hindsight it would appear that directors at Speedy Hire made a tough but necessary decision back in Summer 2008. The huge downturn in the market lead to massive exposure to Speedy at a time they needed it least, heavy borrowing to fund multiple acquisitions led to worries of failure to meet banking deadlines.... etc etc.
It seems now that the worse may not be over with talks of more losses within the group.

Watch this space

I was one of the unlucky few to be made redundant by Speedy Hire and in a business sense it probably was the right thing to do but on the other hand the way they handled the redundancies and the running of the company is an absolute farce. They claimed they had to save money at make staff redundant but with the majority of people losing there jobs being ex Hewden seemed like a bit of a witchhunt to any non concering eye. they spent 115 mil or in excess of in buying Hewden , the recession hit they panicked and started selling vast amounts of plant , laying off more experienced staff just because they earn that extra bit more than non experienced. I have not worked with Speedy for well over a year now and quite frankly i would not recommend any individual to ever work with a company that does not value its staff. Before the redundancies hit they were searching for staff to take a several week wage in advance of handing your notice in to try and dodge the pay outs they had to make if made redundant . anyone who worked with Speedy that has been paid off reading this i bet my house on the fact that u can relate to thread .