Thousands of workers at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) will be offered redundancies after Britain’s largest car manufacturer had its revenues slashed by falling sales, a cyberattack and Donald Trump’s tariffs.
JLR informed workers and their union on Saturday that the company would be opening a voluntary redundancy programme for salaried and management team members, the BBC and Sunday Times reported.
As many as 4,000 jobs would be cut over two years, the Times reported. JLR told the BBC it was yet to confirm the number but the company, which is owned by Indian conglomerate Tata Motors, needed to save about £1.7bn over the next two years.
Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, told the BBC she and the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, would meet with JLR’s chief executive, PB Balaji, next week, after a weekend of intensive talks to mitigate job losses.
About 30,000 of the company’s 44,000 employees are based in the UK. Most of them work at 14 plants across the West Midlands, where the company is one of the region’s largest employers.
The job cuts will be unwelcome news for the prime minister, Andy Burnham, who has pledged to “safeguard sovereign manufacturing” and reindustrialise Britain.
Under his predecessor Keir Starmer, Labour said it would underwrite a £1.5bn loan guarantee to JLR after it halted production for several weeks last year in response to a cyber-attack.
The attack led to a 27% drop in overall production and cost the company about £200m. It was one of several factors contributing to the company posting a profit before tax of just £14m – down from £2.5bn the year before.
Tariffs on vehicles imported into the US – which Trump raised to 25% before agreeing a deal for 10% for the UK – also caused turmoil for the carmaker, which is attempting to push more luxury cars to the US market. This contributed to the company’s retail and wholesale volumes – sales via dealerships – falling by about 70,000 and 90,000 respectively.
“These challenges arrived with the global automotive industry already under continued pressure from cost inflation, slower-than-expected uptake of electric vehicles, and the deterioration of market conditions in China,” Balaji said in the company’s annual report published in May.
The carmaker this week launched its first electric Range Rover in an effort to appeal to climate-conscious fans of the luxury SUV – at a starting price of £154,070.
