Britain's Biggest Independent Timber Merchant Collapsed Last November. The 561 Jobs It Took With It Are Only Being Counted Now.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
In short. National Timber Group, the UK's largest independent timber supplier, had administrators appointed on 26 November 2025, with 561 immediate redundancies and 13 branches closed on the spot, London Gazette notices confirm [1]. 169 of those job losses were in Scotland, across six closed sites [2]. Graded REPORTED, status departed. This ledger only found the figure eleven months later.
A year-old collapse, found the hard way
National Timber Group traded as Thornbridge, NYTimber, Rembrand Timber and Arnold Laver, built up through a string of acquisitions into 47 sites across England and Scotland with 1,150 staff and a Sheffield head office [3]. Construction News called it the UK's largest independent timber supplier when it reported the collapse [4]. On 26 November 2025, Michael Magnay, Gemma Quinn and Jonathan Marston of Alvarez & Marsal were appointed joint administrators across five group entities, and the effect was immediate: 561 redundancies across sites and central functions, and 13 branches shut the same day [1].
The administration itself is as officially confirmed as this ledger requires. London Gazette notices for National Timber Group England Limited and National Timber Group Scotland Limited were both published on 2 December 2025, naming the same three administrators and giving the court case numbers for each entity [1] [2]. A third notice exists for National Timber Group Midco Limited, filed the same day. None of that is in dispute. What took eleven months was anyone connecting the official notice to the headcount.
169 of the 561 were in Scotland
Six Scottish sites closed outright: Dumbarton, Forfar, Newton Stewart, Stirling, Hawkhill in Edinburgh, and Anniesland in Glasgow, accounting for 169 of the UK-wide total [2]. That is not a trivial regional footnote. Six branches shutting in one country on one day is the kind of local story that ordinarily carries its own headline; here it arrived folded into a UK-wide administration notice that most national coverage treated as a single number.
The cause given throughout, by administrators and by the company's own directors, was financial rather than operational: "a difficult trading period and resultant liquidity challenges," with directors separately citing continued macroeconomic uncertainty, high interest rates reducing demand, and a GBP21.7m impairment loss tied to earlier restructuring [4]. AI is not cited anywhere in the reporting checked for this piece.
How the ledger logs it
Graded REPORTED: London Gazette Appointment of Administrators notices for the England and Scotland entities, both directly confirmed, meet this ledger's highest sourcing bar for the event itself; the 561 and 169 figures come from trade and broadcast press reporting the administrators' and directors' own statements. Status departed: the redundancies took effect with the administration, not as a pending consultation. This is the fourth backfilled discovery gap logged on this ledger this week, after Agetur, Merit Holdings, Unimetals Recycling and Orbex, and the clearest case yet of the gap the pattern itself exposes: this story was searched for and specifically rejected as stale by an earlier pass on 6 November 2026, filed away as "already logged or sub-threshold" without anyone checking the Gazette notice against the headcount. It was neither. Re-examined and confirmed by direct fetch today.
Sources
- The Gazette, "Appointment of Administrators: National Timber Group England Limited," 2 December 2025. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/notice/5009573
- STV News, "UK's largest timber firm axes 169 jobs and closes six sites in Scotland," 26 November 2025. https://news.stv.tv/scotland/uks-largest-timber-firm-axes-169-jobs-and-closes-six-sites-in-scotland
- Builders Merchants Journal, "561 redundancies as administrators appointed at National Timber Group," 26 November 2025. https://buildersmerchantsjournal.net/561-redundancies-as-national-timber-group-as-sale-process-begins/
- Construction News, "UK's largest independent timber supplier enters administration," 27 November 2025. https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/financial/administrations/uks-largest-independent-timber-supplier-enters-administration-27-11-2025/