Peter Black firm to move out of Keighley

It was once said every family in the town had someone working at the firm, which was founded in the 1940s.

Black’s parent company, Li & Fung, hopes its entire Keighley workforce – now numbering 62 – will relocate to a new office across the Pennines.

The Keighley staff are currently involved in design, development and supply chain management of footwear and accessories and rent their offices from a landlord who owns the former Black’s factory in Lawkholme Lane.

Much of the complex, known as the Aire Valley Business Centre, is occupied by other companies.

The move marks the end of an era for what was once one of Keighley's biggest companies with more than 1,000 workers. The firm initially used old army webbing to make shopping bags and grew to be one of Marks & Spencer’s leading suppliers.

By the 1990s times were changing in Black’s key markets, with the footwear business particularly affected by evolving tastes and cheap foreign imports.

Hundreds of jobs were lost in the early 1990s, and another 285 in 1995 as footwear manufacturing closed.

A spokesman for Li & Fung, one of the world’s biggest trading companies, said it had continued to expand in the UK and Europe since taking over the Peter Black group in 2008.

A number of the Peter Black companies had since moved away from Keighley, with only the Peter Black Footwear & Accessories and LF Europe teams remaining.

The spokesman said: “Due to our current commercial pressures a continued presence in Keighley is no longer tenable.

“The move will take place gradually over the next 12 months to ensure that we can support our staff as much as possible in relocating them to Manchester.”

The Peter Black hammer blow coincides with news that another Keighley company, Oakworth Joinery, is closing with the loss of 170 jobs.

Keighley MP Kris Hopkins “regretted” that Li & Gung had decided to move and said the loss of any jobs from the Keighley economy was bad news.

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