High Street stalwart BHS is set to be liquidated after final efforts to find a buyer for the beleaguered retailer failed yesterday.

The move puts up to 11,000 jobs at risk, including 8,000 members of staff and 3,000 non-BHS employees who work in the retailer’s 163 stores. It is the biggest business collapse on the UK High Street since Woolworths went under nearly eight years ago.

A number of bidders have expressed interest in BHS since it went into administration in April, including executives from Sports Direct, Matalan, IKEA, Edinburgh Woollen Mill, MotherCare and Poundstretcher. But BHS administrators Duff & Phelps confirmed that the company would now be wound down after being unable to sell it as a going concern.

Duff & Phelps said in statement: “Despite the considerable efforts of the administrators and BHS senior management, it has not been possible to agree a sale of the business. Although multiple offers were received, none were able to complete a deal due to the working capital required to secure the future of the company.”

Industry commentators have put the demise of BHS down to a failure to respond to the evolving multi-channel retail environment, a lacklustre product range and a dearth of business investment.

Nick Lee, professor of marketing at Warwick Business School, noted: “Sadly, there seemed to be no strategy in place to change perceptions of BHS from what they were in the past, which was a broad-based, reasonably priced department store. Unfortunately, new competition from low price retailers and online left BHS in a weak position, and unable to answer convincingly ‘why would a customer buy from BHS rather than a competitor?’”

BHS, which has been on the UK High Street for 88 years, was owned by Arcadia boss Philip Green for 15 years until he sold it for £1 to a group led by former racing car driver Dominic Chappell in March 2015.

Both of the businessmen have been called to appear before the work and pensions parliamentary committee to answer questions over the retailer’s collapse. The company has a pensions’ deficit of £571 million, which may have to be picked up by the government’s Pension Protection Fund.

Jon Copestake, chief retail and consumer goods analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said: “The question of how company executives were able to extract so much money from the retailer during its 16-year drift into liquidation will no doubt be high on the agenda, especially since the failure of a retail brand like BHS has been something that any visitor to its half-empty stores in recent years might have made an educated guess at.”

Commenting on the inevitable BHS asset sell-off, he added: “As with all fire sales, the best assets will no doubt be picked up cheaply and resurrected by more successful retailers, but many will not as the British High Street continues to undergo a painful correction to accommodate changing shopper habits.”

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