The footwear retailer Shoe Zone has shared it will be shutting some of its stores around the UK, citing soaring wage costs as a main reason.

The group employs around 2,250 staff across 297 stores in the UK and said it had experienced “very challenging trading conditions” between the start of October and the middle of December.

They said this was because of lower consumer confidence and unseasonal weather, which had led to falling sales and decreasing profit.

Additionally, they stated that the Chancellor’s move to increase employers’ national insurance contributions and increase the minimum wage has led to “significant additional costs”.

“These additional costs have resulted in the planned closure of a number of stores that have now become unviable,” it explained.

The firm declined to comment further and did not provide any details on how many stores had shut or the number of workers affected.

It is understood that the extra costs it is facing from the Budget announcements is seeing it accelerate plans already in place to overhaul its store estate, the Press Association reports.

The group has already been closing loss-making stores over the past year, revealing in October that 26 sites had been shut on a net basis – 53 closed, less 27 opened – in the year to September 28.

As well as shutting less profitable shops, it is also revamping remaining high street stores and increasing its number of new larger sites based in locations such as retail parks.

What changes were made in the most recent Budget?

As reported by The Guardian, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced an increase in the rate of employer national insurance from 13.8% to 15% from April next year.

In addition, the threshold at which employers start paying the tax on each employee’s salary was lowered to £5,000 from £9,100.

The measures, expected to ultimately raise £25bn a year, have drawn criticism from a string of large businesses.

The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, has described businesses’ reaction to the NICs increase as the “biggest issue” facing the UK’s economy after the budget, at a time of rising economic uncertainty in the UK and globally.

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Shoe Zone – which sells almost 14m pairs of shoes a year, at an average retail price of £13.30 – said the combination of higher costs and falling sales would have a “significant impact on our full-year figures”.

This prompted the company to issue its second profit warning of the year, as it halved its profit forecast for the current year.

Shoe Zone now expects to make an adjusted pre-tax profit of about £5m in the year to 27 September, down from previous estimates of £10m