Timber firm jobs boost

Around 50 extra jobs are to be created by an outdoor timber product company near Kidderminster, which is bucking the recession with a £2.5 million expansion.

Forest Garden Ltd is completing an expansion which has seen a bigger manufacturing and distribution centres created on the Hartlebury Trading Estate at Hartlebury.

Earlier this year there were 100 full-time workers on the site and this has been increased by the transfer of 103 people from a site at Eardisley in Herefordshire, which ceased operations today.

Now the company is hoping that people who are tightening their belts during the credit crunch and deciding to improve their homes rather than move house will help add even greater impetus to demand for its products.

The firm, which supplies garden centres, builders merchants and do-it-yourself outlets with garden buildings, fencing and decking, plans to complete the transfer and expansion on the Hartlebury site early in the New Year.

It expects to take on a nother 50 workers in the spring.

Jonathan Halford, chief executive officer of Forest, which also has sites at Sennybridge and Lockerbie, said: "The transfer and expansion on the Hartlebury site is nearing an end and we hope to have completed this by Christmas with the new facility in operation from January 5.

"The Forest Garden Group has continued to build on the positive progress made since the management buyout in 2006. We do believe that there is every indication that people are deciding to improve not move homes and we manufacture a lot of items which people find helpful with storage such as sheds.

"Because of this I think that in the Spring of next year, around March to June time, we hope to see the creation of up to a further 50 extra jobs."