5,000 jobs set to go at Jaguar Land Rover in new year

According to the Financial Times, the cuts will be announced in January and will form part of the company’s £2.5bn cost-cutting drive to boost short-term profitability. That plan, known as Project Charge, came on the back of Q3 financial results that saw JLR post a £90m loss from July to September. Its most recent sales figures from November showed a year-on-year drop of eight per cent, with overall sales for January to November down 4.4 per cent. The weak performance has been blamed on flagging demand in China, combined with uncertainty over diesel regulations and Brexit.

“In China, we continue to see significant market challenges but we remain focused on taking all the operational actions necessary to balance production with demand,” Felix Brautigam, JLR’s chief commercial officer, said on the back of the recent results.

In a sequence of announcements made since June 2018, JLR has revealed that production of its Discovery model would move from Solihull to Slovakia and that 1,000 workers at its Castle Bromwich plant would drop to a three-day week. The Solihull plant – which has already shed around 1,000 workers - also saw a two-week shutdown in October to compensate for the shrinking demand for JLR vehicles. The ‘operational actions’ referred to by Brautigam will now almost certainly see thousands more jobs go across the company’s Midlands plants.