BURNLEY'S only department store - the town centre Co-op Living Store - has been taken over as part of a £150 million deal.

The sell-off of non-food interests by Co-operative retail Services to London-based group Miller Developments has thrown the future of the 44 Burnley staff into doubt, with a guarantee only that the store will operate as normal for the next three months.

Miller has bought all 44 Living Stores for £69 million, with CRS also selling its Homeworld interests for £80 million to the Woolworth Kingfisher group.

The Co-op sale aims to help the UK's largest co-operative retailer escape from a deepening financial crisis, which saw losses for the year to January 1998 leap 90 per cent to £25.6 million.

Latest results due next month are expected to show CRS slipping further into the red.

The CRS will now concentrate on its food and funerals interests - including the Pioneer superstore in Burnley.

The purpose built Living Store in Market Square was opened in the early 1970s as Pendle House, when interests also included food retailing. Burnley MP Peter Pike was one of the Burnley Co-operative Society board members who signed the contract in the late 1960s for the store to be built. Today he said he was saddened by news of the sell off which was another blow to the concept of mutuality. "I was anxious to see co-operative interests develop, but somehow the co-operative movement has lost its way."

The sale of Burnley's biggest non-food outlet - a two-storey centre selling a wide range of goods from clothes to carpets, cookware to crystal - brings an end to the Co-op's non-food interests in Burnley and Pendle for the first time this century. CRS closed its Quality House store in Nelson's Admiral Centre two years' ago to halt mounting losses and its interests in Colne - once the richest Co-op in the land - were closed several years ago.

New CRS boss Andy Meehan, formerly of the Storehouse group, visited the Burnley co-op stores with Mr Pike shortly after taking over as chief executive and promised radical changes for CRS.

A CRS spokesman said today the staff at the Burnley Living store would be offered job counselling and there was the possibility of other jobs being found for them elsewhere in the CRS empire.

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