Employment minister Tony McNulty has adopted an indifferent stance on the prospect of hundreds of thousands of retail job losses as the downturn bites.

Speaking on the BBC’s Newsnight programme last night as Woolworths and MFI slid into administration, McNulty dismissed as “utterly speculative” expert forecasts of 300,000 retail job losses and the collapse of up to 10 household name store groups.

More than 30,000 are already at risk at Woolworths and MFI.

McNulty said: “It’s not my job to be alongside the futurologists and Mystic Megs. It’s my job to deal with each sector, each firm, as and when it gets into difficulty.” He said, however, that he was “standing ready with Jobcentre Plus”.

He dismissed suggestions that the 2.5 percentage point VAT cut revealed on Monday was insufficient in the context of widespread and deep discounting across the high street as a “rather foolish notion” and said store groups facing collapse could not expect the same sort of Government intervention as occurred with banks.

McNulty said the analogy between the problems of the two industries was “false” because banking is at the heart of every business sector while a “broad realignment” in retail was already happening before the downturn.

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