ONLY a "small" number of workers at Nestlé Rowntree have had to take compulsorily redundancy.

And the total number of job losses has been cut slightly from the original shock figure of 645 - although Nestlé is unable to say by precisely how much.

Nestlé and its trades unions have issued a joint statement saying that employees had been advised yesterday how they had been personally impacted by a massive re-structuring of the York confectionery factory, announced last September.

"A tremendous amount of hard work has taken place over the past few weeks, looking at the preferences employees expressed and matching people with the right skills to roles in the new York factory," said the statement.

"Both the company and the trades unions are very pleased that the majority of employees in the factory have achieved the outcome they wanted.

"Throughout this process the company and the Trades Unions have worked jointly to bring down the number of roles affected. Nestlé Rowntree will be offering support and advice to the small number of people who have been adversely affected."

The Press understands that "adversely affected" is a reference to staff being unhappy for two primary reasons: some workers in one area volunteered for redundancy but were refused, while others working elsewhere have been made redundant without having volunteered.

A factory worker told the paper that there had been slightly more volunteers than available redundancies in the process side of the factory, but insufficient volunteers in the management and craft side."Most people seemed to get what they wanted, having accepted that the redundancy payments were much poorer than they would have been at one time," said the worker.

Many members of staff are understood to have agreed to changes such as early retirement, voluntary redundancy and re-deployment within the workplace.

A company spokeswoman she was unable to clarify the numbers who had been adversely affected, and nor could she put a figure at this stage on the grand total of redundancies.

GMB union spokesman John Kirk was unavailable for comment.