The Co-operative Group has hired not more than 150 staff at the Somerfield's head office at Bristol out of the 1,022 original headcount since it acquired the grocery chain last year for £1.57bn, The Independent has reported.

Out of the remaining 872 Somerfield employees, 613 have already left to take up other jobs in the market. Most of the remaining staff intend to leave by the end of this year, though a skeletal staff will stay back until June 2011 to support handover of systems, the paper reported.

The Manchester-based Co-operative Group has had plans to shutter the Somerfield head office to save costs, but the scale of compulsory redundancies is becoming clear only now.

Its spokesman said they have been "utterly transparent from the outset" regarding the process and began consultations with the concerned unions in June 2009 to lay off jobs.

A spokesman for the Usdaw union has been reported as saying by the paper that they have "no issues with the very thorough consultation process the Co-operative Group has undertaken with the individual staff concerned".