Sayers the Bakers and its discount sister brand Poundbakery have now shut more than 30 shops across the North West, North Wales, Yorkshire and the West Midlands, well beyond the 19 closures their owner announced in August, and former staff say they have been told the company cannot pay them for their final shifts. According to the Liverpool Echo, an email sent by S&PB Retail Ltd on Friday 11 September said a proposed Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) had been refused and that outstanding wages would instead be handled through the government’s Redundancy Payments Service. For a chain that began in a basement kitchen in Old Swan, Liverpool, in 1912, it is the most serious moment since the business was bought out of administration in 2019.
This piece sets out what has actually closed, what the company has said and not said, what the refused CVA means, and what the workers and high streets left behind can do next. The short version: this is no longer a tidy store-portfolio review. It has become a cash crisis with a statutory safety net as the only source of pay for people who worked their last shift in good faith.
In short
- More than 30 Sayers and Poundbakery shops are now listed as permanently closed, against the 19 closures S&PB Retail announced on 21 August with around 100 redundancies expected.
- Staff at some branches were given 24 hours’ notice or less, with several Merseyside shops told on the morning of Saturday 5 September that they would close the same day, per the Liverpool Echo.
- A CVA proposal was denied, according to an email from the company seen by the Echo, and unpaid wages are being pushed to the government Redundancy Payments Service (RPS).
- The RPS only pays where an employer is formally insolvent: workers need a case reference number, and claims are capped at £751 a week for up to eight weeks of arrears.
- Companies House shows S&PB Retail Ltd’s accounts as overdue: the filing covering the year to 31 May 2025 was due on 31 May 2026 and has not been made.
What has actually closed, and where?
The official position from S&PB Retail, the Leeds-registered company behind both brands, dates from 21 August. In a statement reported by British Baker and later by the Liverpool Echo, the company said that following “a comprehensive review of our store portfolio” it had concluded “a number of locations are no longer commercially viable”, and that senior management had “proposed to close 19 underperforming shops at the end of August 2026, which is expected to result in approx 100 redundancies”. British Baker reported the group employed around 800 people and would be left with roughly 72 shops after the cuts.
The reality on the ground has run ahead of that plan. On 9 September the Echo published a list of more than 30 Sayers and Poundbakery sites either marked “permanently closed” on Google or removed from the company’s own website. The list spans Ashton-on-Mersey, Belle Vale, Bidston, two Blackpool shops, two in Bootle, Breck Road, Chorley, Garston, Knutsford, Lawrence Road in Liverpool, Littleborough, Rochdale, Runcorn, Shotton, Timperley, Tranmere, West Kirby, Halifax, Dudley, Fleetwood, Bury, Huyton, Middleton, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Old Swan, Wakefield, Walsall and Wolverhampton. Several of those premises, the paper reported, had already been put back on the property market.
The company has never confirmed which shops were in the original 19, and it has not explained why the number is now above 30. The Echo said it asked repeatedly for a full list and the timing of staff notifications and received either “no comment” or “no further comment”. The gap between the announced programme and the observed closures is the first thing any supplier, landlord or council officer dealing with the business should register.
The Poundbakery closures came first
The discount brand was hit before the Sayers estate. The Daily Express and Express & Star reported on 7 September that five Poundbakery shops had closed since 27 August, all after at least a decade on their high streets: Wolverhampton and Dudley in the Black Country, plus Sheffield, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Fleetwood.
The Express & Star described shutters coming down abruptly, with staff reportedly made redundant on the spot. Poundbakery sells £1.20 sausage rolls and £2 pasties and had 37 stores listed on its website at the time.
Rhyl: the redundancy letter that named the cause
In North Wales, the Rhyl Journal reported that Poundbakery’s High Street shop in Rhyl traded for the last time on Saturday 5 September after becoming “unprofitable”. Staff there had received a redundancy letter from S&PB Retail the week before.
The letter, as quoted by the Journal, said “the decline in cashflow has meant that we have no alternative but to close the unprofitable shops”. That is a materially different explanation from the August statement, which spoke about shopping habits and cost inflation. Cashflow is a liquidity problem, and it is the word that connects the closures to the pay dispute that followed.
Why are staff saying they have not been paid?
The most serious development came on Saturday 12 September, when the Liverpool Echo reported that former workers at both brands claim they have not been paid for hours they had already worked. The paper spoke to two named employees.
Lynn Harrison, 64, from Wallasey, worked at the Pound Bakery on Townfield Way in Liscard. She said the store’s area manager told staff on the morning of 5 September that the shop would close at 12.30pm that day and all employees would be made redundant. Staff were asked to count and run down the remaining stock until the doors shut.
“Obviously everyone was in a panic. We were in shock,” she told the Echo. “I knew they were closing a couple in August but we were told we were not one of them. We all thought our jobs were fine.” She said she is owed for 26 hours, roughly £350, and later added: “I wish I would’ve put my keys down and walked out.”
Tanya Carter, 36, from Birkenhead, worked at the Sayers shop in Rock Ferry. She said management called at 11am on 5 September to say the shop would close at 2pm, asked her to come in for a few hours to count stock and wipe down the shop, and promised she would be paid. She told the paper she is owed around £200.
On the morning of Friday 11 September, according to the Echo, the business told staff it was “not able to make payment for hours worked up to and including the closure of stores”. In an email seen by the paper, S&PB Retail said that a CVA proposal was denied and that money owed to staff for outstanding wages “will be dealt with through the government Redundancy Payment Scheme (RPS)”. The email said reference numbers needed to claim would be available by the end of the week ending 20 September. The Echo said it had put the employees’ claims to the company and had not received a response.
None of this has been confirmed by the company in public, and the account rests on the employees’ testimony and the email the Echo says it has seen. But the sequence is consistent with the Rhyl redundancy letter’s language about cashflow, and with the pattern of same-day closures reported across Merseyside. The pattern also echoes a wider month for high-street job losses: when TG Jones closed 19 shops in September, the towns concerned at least had weeks of notice.
What does a refused CVA actually mean?
A Company Voluntary Arrangement is a court-recognised deal in which a company asks its unsecured creditors, typically landlords, suppliers and HMRC, to accept reduced or rescheduled payments so the business can keep trading. It needs approval from creditors holding at least 75% by value of the debt that votes. Retailers have used CVAs for years to cut rents and exit unwanted leases; it is the mechanism that keeps a brand alive while the balance sheet is repaired.
If the proposal is voted down, the company is back where it started, but with two important differences. First, creditors now know the business considers itself unable to meet its obligations in full, which tends to harden their stance. Second, the directors face the legal duty to stop trading in a way that worsens the position of creditors if they believe the company cannot avoid insolvent liquidation.
In practice, a refused CVA is very often followed within weeks by administration or a creditors’ voluntary liquidation. That is not a prediction about S&PB Retail specifically; it is simply the usual road.
The catch for workers: the RPS needs a formal insolvency
Here is the detail that matters most for the people owed £200 or £350. The government’s Redundancy Payments Service does not pay out just because an employer says it has no money. According to the official guidance on gov.uk, employees can only apply once the employer is insolvent, and the person dealing with the insolvency, the insolvency practitioner or the official receiver, must issue a “CN” case reference number. The guidance is explicit: “You cannot claim without the CN number.”
A CVA that has been rejected is not, on its own, an insolvency event. It follows that if the company genuinely intends to route unpaid wages through the RPS, it will need to enter a formal process, most likely administration or liquidation, and the reference numbers it has promised by 20 September would come from an appointed practitioner rather than from the company itself. As of the morning of Sunday 13 September, the Companies House record for S&PB Retail Ltd (company number 12570881) still showed the company as active with no insolvency filing, though the register can lag appointments by several days.
How much can Sayers workers claim, and how fast?
The RPS is a real safety net, but it is a capped one and it is not quick. The gov.uk guidance sets out what a redundant employee of an insolvent business can claim, and the caps rose on 6 April 2026.
| Claim type | What the RPS pays | Cap and conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Unpaid wages, overtime, commission | Up to 8 weeks of arrears | £751 per week (£719 if dismissed before 6 April 2026); only money in the employment contract; taxed as income |
| Holiday pay | Up to 6 weeks accrued or taken but unpaid | Only holiday from the 12 months before the insolvency; same weekly cap |
| Statutory redundancy pay | 0.5, 1 or 1.5 weeks’ pay per year of service depending on age | Needs 2 years’ continuous service; £751 weekly cap; maximum 20 years counted |
| Statutory notice pay | Pay for the notice period not worked | Claimed separately with an “LN” number after the notice period would have ended; benefits deducted |
Two practical points follow. A part-time counter assistant owed 26 hours is comfortably under the weekly cap, so the amount is not the problem; the timing is. The guidance says payments usually take up to six weeks once a claim is lodged, and a claim cannot be lodged without the case number. Claims for redundancy, wages and holiday must be made within six months of dismissal.
Employees with two years’ service also have a statutory redundancy entitlement on top of their wages, which for a 64-year-old with long service could be worth substantially more than the missing shift pay.
What former staff should do this week
Keep every payslip, rota, text message and email, including the 11 September message about the CVA. Note the exact hours worked in the final week and who instructed the work.
Register with the local Jobcentre Plus and ask about the Rapid Response Service, which supports people for up to 13 weeks after redundancy. If no case number arrives by 20 September, contact the Redundancy Payments Service directly, and consider Acas or a trade union for advice on a tribunal claim, since the guidance notes that a failure to consult on redundancies can ground a “protective award” even when the employer is insolvent. The official process is described on gov.uk’s guide to your rights if your employer is insolvent.
How did a 114-year-old Liverpool bakery get here?
Sayers was founded in 1912 by Fred and Lylian Sayer, who sold baked goods from a basement kitchen in Old Swan. At its peak the chain ran close to 170 shops and cafés across the North West, and for generations it was the default place to buy a lunchtime pasty in Liverpool, Wirral and Lancashire towns. Poundbakery was created in 2010 as a value format, selling the same kinds of products at a lower ticket, and the two were folded into a single corporate entity after the 2019 administration, when Karen Wood bought the business. It is run by Mark James and David Silvester, and its products are made at the David Wood Foods facility on Sidney Street in Bolton, according to British Baker.
The decline has been gradual, then sudden. British Baker’s 2026 ranking of the top 75 UK bakery businesses moved the group from 13th to 18th place. Around a quarter of the estate closed during 2025, the trade title said. Last August the group shut its shop at the Churchill Shopping Centre in Aintree, plus branches on Banks Road in West Kirby and Queens Avenue in Widnes, describing a “strategic restructuring programme” in “response to the ever-evolving High Street and wider market challenges”.
Twelve months on, the same language reappeared alongside a much bigger closure count.
A corporate structure built for regional trading
Companies House shows S&PB Retail Ltd was incorporated on 24 April 2020, briefly under the name Sayers and Poundbakery Retail Limited, with its registered office at 1 Calverley Road, Oulton, Leeds. Its SIC codes cover the retail sale of bread, cakes and confectionery in specialised stores. A cluster of subsidiaries, S&PB Retail (Deeside), (Lancashire), (Liverpool), (Manchester), (Merseyside), (Midlands) and (Yorkshire), were all incorporated on 30 March 2022 at the same address.
The register also flags the parent’s accounts as overdue: the filing for the year to 31 May 2025 was due by 31 May 2026 and had not been made as of this weekend. Overdue accounts are not proof of distress, but they remove the one public document that suppliers and landlords could have used to gauge it.
Timeline: from portfolio review to unpaid wages
| Date | Event | Reported by |
|---|---|---|
| August 2025 | Aintree, West Kirby and Widnes shops close under a “strategic restructuring programme” | Liverpool Echo |
| 21 August 2026 | S&PB Retail announces 19 shop closures at the end of August, around 100 redundancies from 800 staff | British Baker, Liverpool Echo |
| 27 August onward | Five Poundbakery shops close in Wolverhampton, Dudley, Sheffield, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Fleetwood | Express & Star, Daily Express |
| 3 September | Merseyside staff say they were given 24 hours’ notice of next-day closure | Liverpool Echo |
| 5 September | Rhyl Poundbakery trades for the last time; Liscard and Rock Ferry staff told to close the same day | Rhyl Journal, Liverpool Echo |
| 9 to 10 September | More than 30 sites listed as permanently closed on Google or removed from the Sayers website | Liverpool Echo |
| 11 September | Company email says CVA proposal denied and wages will go through the RPS; reference numbers promised by 20 September | Liverpool Echo |
| 12 September | Former staff go public over unpaid final shifts | Liverpool Echo |
Why is a value bakery failing while Greggs grows?
The obvious comparison is Greggs, which competes for exactly the same £2 lunch. Greggs reported on 29 July that first-half sales rose 7.2% to £1.1bn, like-for-like sales in company-managed shops rose 2.1%, and profit before tax rose 19.7% to £76m. It opened 34 net new shops in the half to reach 2,773 by 27 June, even after trimming its full-year opening target to 100–110. The contrast is stark, and it is worth being precise about why, because “people are not on the high street” is only part of it.
| Measure | Sayers and Poundbakery (S&PB Retail) | Greggs plc |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 1912 (Sayers), 2010 (Poundbakery) | 1939 |
| Shops | About 72 after the August plan; more than 30 now listed as closed | 2,773 at 27 June 2026 |
| Staff | Around 800 before the August cuts | Tens of thousands (not disclosed in H1 summary) |
| Ownership | Private, owned by Karen Wood since 2019 | FTSE-listed public company |
| Latest trading | “Decline in cashflow”; accounts overdue at Companies House | H1 2026 sales +7.2%, PBT £76m, LFL +2.1% |
| Price point | £1.20 sausage roll, £2 pasty (Poundbakery) | Similar entry prices with a broader hot food and drinks range |
| Footprint | North West, North Wales, Yorkshire, West Midlands | UK-wide, including travel hubs, retail parks and supermarket concessions |
Three structural differences explain most of the gap. Greggs has spent a decade moving its shops away from secondary high streets and towards where people now are: retail parks, petrol forecourts, railway stations, hospitals and supermarket concessions, and it has added evening trading and delivery. A regional chain anchored in town-centre parades in places like Bootle, Tranmere and Rochdale is exposed to exactly the footfall decline the company cited.
Second, scale: Greggs can absorb the April 2026 rise in the National Living Wage to £12.71 an hour and the employer National Insurance changes that took effect in April 2025 (a 15% rate above a £5,000 threshold) across a £2bn revenue base; a 72-shop chain cannot. Third, a value brand has the least room of anyone to pass costs on. When your entire proposition is a £1.20 sausage roll, inflation in flour, energy and wages goes straight to the margin.
What does this mean for the towns left behind?
Every one of the closed shops sat in the kind of location that shopappy exists to champion: a high street or a precinct in a town or a suburb, not a retail park. A bakery is an anchor for the smaller units around it because it generates repeat, daily visits. Take one out of a parade and the newsagent, the card shop and the hairdresser lose passing trade, which is why councils treat these closures as a planning problem rather than a corporate one.
Liverpool in particular is absorbing several blows at once. As we reported, B&M is closing its County Road store in Walton in November on a parade already hit by Everton’s move from Goodison Park, and now Sayers has withdrawn from Breck Road, Old Swan, Garston, Belle Vale, Lawrence Road, Huyton, Bootle and Tranmere. That is a concentration of losses in exactly the districts where the independent replacements will need to come from.
The wider cost picture for those replacements is not encouraging. The Association of Convenience Stores’ latest report found the sector’s business rates bill has almost doubled in two years, and we set out in our analysis of the ACS Local Shop Report 2026 how investment by small shop owners has started to stall as a result. Any independent baker eyeing one of the vacated Sayers units will be doing the sums against the same wage floor and the same rates regime that S&PB Retail said it could not carry.
What landlords and councils can do quickly
Several of the closed premises are already listed for let, according to the Echo. The most useful thing a landlord can do is price a short, flexible lease for a local operator rather than hold out for a national covenant that is unlikely to arrive on a secondary parade. Councils can help with meanwhile-use licences and by making sure the discretionary rate reliefs they already control are advertised to prospective tenants. Local business improvement districts, where they exist, should be treating each vacated bakery as a priority re-let, because the daily-visit anchor effect is what keeps the neighbouring units viable.
Could the closures have been handled differently?
Whatever the financial position, the manner of the closures is likely to attract scrutiny. UK collective redundancy law requires an employer proposing 20 or more redundancies at one establishment within 90 days to consult employee representatives for at least 30 days. Whether the multi-site nature of the closures engages that duty depends on how “establishment” is defined for each shop, which is exactly the kind of question a tribunal would examine. What is not in dispute, on the employees’ accounts, is that some were told at 10am or 11am that their shop would close at lunchtime, asked to work out the stock, and then told a week later that they would not be paid for doing so.
The employment law backdrop is also about to change. From 1 October the time limit for bringing most tribunal claims doubles from three to six months, and further duties on employers arrive later in the month, as we explained in our guide to the Employment Rights Act changes landing on 1 October. For Sayers staff dismissed on 5 September, the existing three-month clock is already running, and advice from Acas or a union is worth taking early rather than late.
What should shoppers and independent retailers watch next?
The first marker is 20 September, the date by which the company’s email said RPS reference numbers would be available. If they arrive, it will almost certainly mean an insolvency practitioner has been appointed, and a notice at Companies House or in The Gazette should follow. If they do not, former staff will be in the difficult position of having been told to claim from a scheme that cannot yet accept their claims.
The second marker is the remaining estate. The August plan implied roughly 72 shops would continue trading. With more than 30 closures already recorded, the surviving count is unclear, and the company has declined to say which shops it considers viable. Anyone who relies on a Sayers or Poundbakery for a lunchtime trade, including neighbouring shops that benefit from its footfall, should assume nothing until the position is clarified.
The third is the broader demand picture. The Office for National Statistics publishes August retail sales on 18 September, and the early private-sector reads, which we summarised ahead of the UK retail sales figures landing on 18 September, point to a slowdown in non-food spending. A weak print will not change anything for Sayers, but it will tell the next regional chain with a cashflow problem how much help it can expect from the consumer this autumn. The answer, on current evidence, is not much.
Frequently asked questions
How many Sayers and Poundbakery shops have closed?
The company announced 19 closures on 21 August 2026, but by 9 September the Liverpool Echo had identified more than 30 sites listed as permanently closed on Google or removed from the Sayers website. The company has not published a definitive list.
Is Sayers going into administration?
Not confirmed. According to an email seen by the Liverpool Echo, a Company Voluntary Arrangement proposal was refused. A refused CVA is often followed by administration or liquidation, and the government redundancy scheme the company has pointed staff to only pays out once a formal insolvency is in place, but no such filing appeared on Companies House as of 13 September.
Why have Sayers staff not been paid?
Former employees told the Echo that on 11 September the company said it could not pay for hours worked up to and including the closure of stores, and that outstanding wages would be handled through the government Redundancy Payments Service. The company has not commented publicly.
How do Sayers workers claim unpaid wages from the government?
Through the Redundancy Payments Service on gov.uk, once the employer is formally insolvent and an insolvency practitioner or the official receiver has issued a CN case reference number. Claims cover up to eight weeks of unpaid wages, capped at £751 a week, plus holiday pay, statutory redundancy pay and notice pay. Payment usually takes up to six weeks.
Which towns have lost a Sayers or Poundbakery?
Reported closures include Liverpool (Old Swan, Breck Road, Garston, Belle Vale, Lawrence Road), Bootle, Huyton, Tranmere, Bidston, West Kirby, Liscard, Rock Ferry, Runcorn, Blackpool, Fleetwood, Chorley, Bury, Rochdale, Middleton, Littleborough, Ashton-on-Mersey, Timperley, Knutsford, Shotton, Rhyl, Halifax, Wakefield, Sheffield, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Dudley, Walsall and Wolverhampton.
Who owns Sayers the Bakers?
S&PB Retail Ltd, a private company registered in Leeds and owned by Karen Wood, who bought the business out of administration in 2019. It is managed by Mark James and David Silvester, according to British Baker and the Liverpool Echo.
Why did Sayers say it was closing shops?
The August statement cited “a very difficult trading period” driven by changing shopping habits, fewer people on the high street and inflation in operating costs that could not be passed on to customers. A later redundancy letter quoted by the Rhyl Journal referred to “the decline in cashflow”.
Are Sayers and Poundbakery the same company?
Yes. Poundbakery was launched in 2010 as a value brand and the two have operated as a single corporate entity, S&PB Retail, since the 2019 buyout. Products for both are made at the David Wood Foods site in Bolton.
Is Greggs affected by the same pressures?
Greggs faces the same wage and National Insurance costs but reported first-half 2026 sales up 7.2% to £1.1bn and profit before tax of £76m, helped by its shift towards retail parks, travel hubs, delivery and evening trading. Scale and location mix, not the product, separate the two.