Marks and Sparks are close to a cull of 7,000 staff due directly to Covid. They have a substantial branch network that customers have not been able to visit and try things on for many weeks and have had approx 1/3^rd of their staff on furlough, out of 78,000, thanks to the Government initiatives, that would no doubt have made the headcount much higher.

They are not the first big name to go down this route and will certainly not be the last to announce staff reductions forecasted to take the overall unemployed figure, currently close to 4%, to double that and possibly more, before the end of the year.