{"id":763570,"date":"2026-09-08T04:14:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T04:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/763570\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T04:14:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T04:14:14","slug":"jonathan-reynolds-is-right-jaguar-land-rover-doesnt-warrant-use-of-public-money-nils-pratley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/763570\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Reynolds is right, Jaguar Land Rover doesn\u2019t warrant use of public money | Nils Pratley"},"content":{"rendered":"

A default reaction to news of job losses in the UK car industry is to ask what the government is going to do about it. So, well done business secretary Jonathan Reynolds for giving the correct response to the question of whether public money will be used to support Jaguar Land Rover<\/a>, which on Monday confirmed 4,000 job cuts over two years<\/a>. His answer was no.<\/p>\n

It is the right stance because JLR\u2019s cost-cutting cannot be compared to a Volkswagen-like existential corporate crisis<\/a>. In common with most European carmakers, JLR has had a rotten 12 months thanks to Donald Trump\u2019s tariffs, luxury taxes in China, inflation in the cost of raw materials and, in its case, a big cyber-attack<\/a>. Yet the company continues to talk bullishly about double-digit growth around the next corner as it prepares to launch five new models.<\/p>\n

Here, for example, was the big-picture outlook assessment in May\u2019s full-year results<\/a>: \u201cLooking ahead, JLR remains resilient and well placed to address the geopolitical, inflationary and regulatory challenges the industry faces. Investment spend is planned to remain at \u00a318bn over the five-year period from FY24 [full year 2024].<\/p>\n

Monday\u2019s job losses were characterised as a major \u2013 but not exceptional \u2013 programme to keep a lid on costs by finding \u00a31.7bn worth of annual savings. Instead of breaking even, cash-wise, when it has sold 350,000 units, JLR wants to get back to 300,000, which was the level in 2024. That seems a reasonable ambition in a trickier market, especially after a period of heavy investment. As Reynolds said, car manufacturers have always flexed the size of their workforce at different points in the business and product cycle.<\/p>\n

Note, too, that the 4,000 job losses \u2013 out of 44,000 people globally and 34,000 in the UK \u2013 will be heavily skewed towards what JLR calls \u201csalaried and management\u201d roles, or white-collar workers in old lingo. In other words, there will be relatively little impact on factory workers who are paid hourly. An outsider may wonder if JLR isn\u2019t simply overpopulated with managers.<\/p>\n

Either way, the appropriate role of government is the normal one of assisting with retraining and re-employment and so on. One assumes action on that front will follow after talks with unions on Tuesday. State financial assistance might be a different matter if we were talking about new battery factories or other big capital programmes, or schemes to take the edge off the UK\u2019s horrendous industrial electricity costs. But the job cuts, as JLR presents them, are simply about staying competitive \u2013 and there\u2019s no reason for government to interfere in that process.<\/p>\n

The big corporate test ahead is chasing the US \u201cluxury\u201d market (and a starting price of \u00a3154,070 for the new electric Range Rover<\/a> means the vehicle definitely qualifies as a luxury item) and avoiding what the chief financial officer calls \u201cthe killing fields of mass automotive\u201d, a reasonable shorthand for Volkswagen\u2019s predicament under competition from China. The next couple of years will be critical for JLR.<\/p>\n

By the same token, one cannot call the job losses a blow to Andy Burnham\u2019s ambitions for \u201creindustrialising\u201d the country. They\u2019re unwelcome, obviously, but were signalled in May and are part of a specific corporate story.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the wider reindustrialisation challenge is working out what the prime minister means. On that score, Reynolds\u2019s early contributions on his return to his old job have been less impressive. His descriptions<\/a> of reindustrialisation have fallen into mushy \u201cbacking the industries of the future\u201d generalities. Work to do on that score \u2013 but the position on JLR is correct.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A default reaction to news of job losses in the UK car industry is to ask what the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":763571,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-763570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763570","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=763570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/763571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}