The chairman of John Lewis has vowed not to cut any jobs over the coming year, despite conceding that the department store group will be forced to tighten up on costs to cope with the fallout from the credit crunch.

Charlie Mayfield, who took charge last year, insisted that there would be no “knee-jerk” reaction to the toughest trading conditions that he could remember.

He said that the privately owned business, a bellwether of the high street, would remain focused on its long-term goals, such as doubling in size over the course of the next nine years.

Mr Mayfield told Personnel Today: “There will be no job cuts. We are a business, we believe in pursuing a long-term approach to growing the business - we are not into making knee-jerk cuts in staff costs just to protect short-term profit.

“Our ownership structure is the key here, because we are owned by our partners. They want us to take a long-term approach, not a short-term one.”

The comments come days after The Times revealed that Marks & Spencer plans to slash redundancy benefits for its 60,000 staff by up to 25 per cent from next Monday. The move has sparked a furious reaction from employees and triggered fears of a middle management cull at the group. M&S refuses to comment about any lay-off plans.

At the weekend it emerged that executive directors at Debenhams had agreed to have their pay frozen to bear the brunt of the credit crunch. About 1,000 other less senior Debenhams management and head office staff will have their pay rises delayed until after Christmas.

John Lewis prides itself on the wages and benefits paid to the 69,000 staff, or “partners”, across both the John Lewis department stores and Waitrose supermarket chain.

Half-year results next month are expected to confirm that John Lewis has suffered a far tougher summer. Only about three of its department stores are thought to have registered sales higher than last year.

Mr Mayfield conceded that the credit crunch had hit sales in areas linked to the housing market, such as furniture and electricals, but he insisted that fashion was doing “extremely well” and said that Waitrose was growing strongly. “You always get a mixed view,” he said, “but there is no doubt generally in the retail sector it is definitely tough.”

Mr Mayfield said that some of the media coverage about the severity of the consumer slowdown had been overstated, but echoed Sir Stuart Rose, Marks & Spencer's executive chairman, in arguing that it had been the speed of the deterioration in trading that had caught retailers by surprise.

“Some of the hype is overstated, but what is different about this [slowdown] is that it has been very sudden. From February and March it was slow, then there was another step down in May - the pace that has happened at has been unusually fast. The depth of it is not as in line with previous difficult trading periods.”

Mr Mayfield refused to give any details of where John Lewis was tightening its costs, but he said that the group was training people in a way that meant that it could deploy them across various store departments.

“At times like this, training people at one department to move into another one where we have got better sales growth, you can actually manage your demand that way,” he said. “We are not cutting back on training - we are continuing to invest in staff.”

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