Harsh economic times and poor management have been blamed for the loss of more than 20 jobs at a long-established glazing firm.

Edenbridge-based Marsland and Company, a manufacturer of windows and doors since 1959, has axed 25 jobs from its 72-strong workforce. It expects the decision to save the loss-making firm about £600,000 a year.

The shock move came just months after the recent appointment of Desmond High and Martin Stanton, Maidstone-based directors of EMC Corporate Finance, as joint chairmen to sort things out.

In an astonishingly frank assessment of the situation, they said weaknesses they had found in the company had become life-threatening and job losses were invevitable as it faced up to "brutal economic reality."

Mr High said: "We found a business with a number of loyal and committed staff, but others who were hardly contributing, which seemed to have barely progressed in terms of business management and procedures since its foundation in 1959. Internal communications were poor or non existent. Training had a zero budget. Customers were enemies making unreasonable demands."

The founding Torstenson family had injected more than a million pounds in the company in the past three years, but the money had "mostly been lost."

Most of the firm’s business comes from public company contractors involved in constructing or refurbishing large-scale social housing projects.

Mr Stanton added that Marsland had won many contracts by offering "rock bottom prices without a clear understanding of how much they cost to make and install."

He claimed many clients had toughened up payment terms and "exploited our lack of knowledge of their contractual requirements."

On a more optimistic note, Mr High said it was not all doom and gloom and there was still business in the firm's market.

"We believe that a slimmed-down business, with a relatively small team of highly-skilled individuals, can return Marsland to its glory days, or at the very least to be profitable at a much lower level of trading, and equipped for eventual upturn."

On wider issues, Mr High said it was hard running a manufacturing business in a rural location without an adequate skills base. Banks also came under fire for "reckless over-lending" that had created many of the problems. Consumers too shared responsibility for the UK’s ailing manufacturing sector because they had "fallen in love with cheap imported goods, without a thought to the carbon footprint.

"Let’s stop shipping goods around the world, and try to persuade the next generation that manufacturing offers a more fulfilling career path for our great mass of graduates than merchant banking."