{"id":450964,"date":"2026-02-28T22:07:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T22:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/450964\/"},"modified":"2026-02-28T22:07:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T22:07:09","slug":"yeovil-mp-hails-outstanding-news-as-leonardo-deal-agreed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/450964\/","title":{"rendered":"Yeovil MP hails &#8216;outstanding news&#8217; as Leonardo deal agreed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It is a strong vote of confidence in our workforce and in Yeovil&#8217;s future,&#8221; he added. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Leonardo&#8217;s chief executive, Roberto Cingolani, earlier said the factory&#8217;s future would be at risk if it was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cz6ygw6wne0o\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">not awarded the government contract.<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Yeovil factory was previously used to built planes used in World War One under the name Westland.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In the 1950s, it switched to making helicopters and more recently has specialised in Merlin and Wildcat helicopters. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Leonardo has sites in Edinburgh, Luton, Basildon, Bristol, Newcastle, Southampton and Lincoln, employing thousands more workers in its supply chains. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#8220;It is a strong vote of confidence in our workforce and in Yeovil&#8217;s future,&#8221; he added. Leonardo&#8217;s chief&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":450965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-450964","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/450965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}