TWENTY jobs are to be lost at the Darwen firm Wolstenholme International because of falling trade in the printing industry.

The jobs will go across all departments, including technical, engineering and production staff as well as office workers.

The firm said "a significant number" of the redundancies were voluntary.

Wolstenholme, which supplies products to the printing ink industry, blamed the cutbacks on poor trading conditions for the last nine months.

A spokesman added: "It is hoped that these redundancies will create a level of savings that will help the company negotiate the current period of slow trading and be in a position to take advantage of an improvement in business levels when this occurs.

"On the positive side, there is no likelihood of the Darwen site suffering any major restructuring or, in fact, any further redundancies based on the current levels of trading.

"The company believes that the slowdown in business has now bottomed out and will be maintaining its existing levels of capacity to be able to benefit from the upturn in business when this occurs, although the timing of this cannot be predicted with certainty."

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