THE regional office of Wainhomes in York has formally closed and 15 people have been made redundant.

The Lawrence Street office, which for nine years was the Yorkshire headquarters of the house building organisation, was being run by a caretaker staff yesterday.

The formal closure comes in the wake of the April takeover of Wainhomes by the Wilson Connolly Group, better known as Wilcon. A spokesperson in the Wainhomes office said some staff at York had now moved to Chesterfield to work at Wilcon's headquarters in Barlborough. Wainhomes had offices in Romney, Chester and Standish when it decided to open a regional Yorkshire office in York in 1992 and grew so rapidly that it was able to float on the Stock Exchange in 1995.

Wilson Connolly envisaged that the acquisition would result in cost savings of about £3.5 million, but claimed today that the savings would be even greater, with Wainhomes particularly encouraging operating performance expected to make a full contribution to profit in the second half of this year. John Coker, regional managing director of Wilcon Homes, said: "Following the acquisition, we decided to combine Wainhomes at York and Wilcon's Chesterfield offices. As a result we unfortunately had to make 15 people redundant, but there have been no redundancies at site level."

Updated: 11:49 Tuesday, July 03, 2001