CLAIMS by former town councillor, Tony Bradford, that Tesco has made 22 full-time staff redundant from its Ledbury store have been strongly denied by the supermarket giant.

But there have been an unspecified number of redundancies in recent months.

And while Tesco declined to provide an official statement, the supermarket giant, via phone and email contacts, told The Reporter there had been “ a small number of redundancies” recently, because of counter changes.

The Tesco store in Ledbury is partly, but not exclusively, self service.

Tesco has also denied the claim that all full time staff at the store have been made redundant, in favour of part-time staff.  There are still full time staff at the Ledbury store, off Orchard Lane.

Claims about the large-scale full-time redundancies were twittered by Mr Bradford on Friday (July 19). A former deputy town mayor, Mr Bradford stood down as a Ledbury Town Councillor in May.  Information provided to the Reporter by Tesco confirmed that the supermarket in Ledbury was not replacing all full time staff with part time staff; and there have been “a significantly smaller number of redundancies than those quoted online”.

Tesco declined to discuss the redundancies at the Ledbury store in any more detail.

Mr Bradford said: "I was told there had been 22 redundancies by a woman who had been made redundant. She had worked at Tesco in Ledbury for a number of years."

She contacted Mr Bradford because she thought he was still a councillor.

There have been Tesco redundancies throughout the UK in recent years.

A BBC report in January stated that more than 10,000 jobs have been cut at Tesco since the current chief executive, Dave Lewis, took over in 2014.