Speaking from Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, John Hannett – Usdaw General Secretary says: “Our members in BHS were left devastated and jobless by the closure of a company that had been trading on high streets for over 80 years. 11,000 hard-working and loyal staff totally let down by the actions of a handful of people at the top who seemed more interested in indulging in a game of corporate monopoly for their own personal gain, rather than running a profitable retail business.

“There are still some very serious questions that need to be answered, by former owners of BHS, about how a company with decades of history and experience in retail has now come to this very sorry end. Sir Philip Green still needs to honour his promise to ‘sort’ the pension scheme, which we had hoped would take weeks rather than months and now the BHS pensioners will fear it might be years.”

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has today announced to Labour’s annual conference: “We’ll shake up how our major corporations work and change how our economy is owned and managed. We’ll clamp down on the abuses of power at the very top. There’ll be no more Philip Greens under Labour and we will legislate to rewrite company law to prevent them.

“We’ll introduce legislation to ban companies taking on excessive debt to pay out dividends to shareholders. And we’ll rewrite the Takeover Code to make sure every takeover proposal has a clear plan in place to pay workers and pensioners.”

Notes for Editors:

Usdaw (Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers) is the UK's fourth biggest and the fastest growing trade union with over 430,000 members. Membership has increased by more than 17% in the last five years and by nearly a third in the last decade. Most Usdaw members work in the retail sector, but the Union also has many members in transport, distribution, food manufacturing, chemicals and other trades.

For Usdaw press releases visit: www.usdaw.org.uk/news and you can follow us on Twitter @UsdawUnion