Bathroom firm blames Brexit as it shuts plant
A MAJOR player in the bathroom sanitary ware market is to cease making shower trays in Huddersfield.
Trojan Plastics has confirmed it is winding down production at its Firm Mills site at Grove Street in Longwood. The company makes baths at its main Britannia Mills facility in Milnsbridge. Most staff are being redeployed but a handful are being forced to take redundancy. However, many workers are agency staff who are not entitled to anything.
One disgruntled worker told The Examiner’s sister website, YorkshireLive, that staff had uncovered the plan to close the Longwood factory from a supplier before it was officially announced.
They then discovered that Trojan’s parent company had bought a rival shower tray manufacturer in a multimillion-pound deal. The worker said “everyone” was upset with how the decision had been handled. They said when management confirmed the end of shower tray manufacturing at Longwood they said Brexit was one of the key problems.
The firm had a large presence in Europe but is now concentrating on the UK market.
The source said some of the difficulty was that some of the older employees were unable to transfer to
Britannia Mills as the work making baths was more physically demanding than shower trays.
They added: “Everybody is upset about it. It’s annoyed a lot of people the way they’ve done it.
“It’s upsetting as we’ve been busy. We made thousands of trays before Christmas, working flat out. It had slowed down a bit coming out of Europe but it was starting to pick up again. They had recently bought an expensive piece of kit for making the products and we thought we were secure.”
A spokesperson for Trojan Plastics, which is owned by Hartford Holdings Group, confirmed they had acquired Essex-based Traymate for an undisclosed sum.
They confirmed Brexit had presented a number of “challenges” it had also presented an opportunity to “concentrate on the UK”.
They said: “With regard to the change of use of Firm Mills; as Traymate specialise in shower tray production, and given the limited number of trays that are able to be made in Firm Mills, we are exploring the manufacture of all shower trays at this specialist plant in Essex.
“This means that the 17 staff who currently work at Firm Mills were made aware of possible redundancies on March 22, but all have been given a choice to either be redeployed or the opportunity to take voluntary redundancy.
“As a company policy we always ask for volunteers at this stage.
“All employees were invited to look at other sites to see if they would like an opportunity to redeploy as we genuinely don’t like making employees redundant. A number of the team are trialling working at other sites right now.
“At this point in time, Firm Mills will be used as a storage facility while Trojan works closely with Kirklees Council to explore future opportunities.”