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, which on Monday confirmed 4,000 job cuts over two years. His answer was no.
It is the right stance because JLR’s cost-cutting cannot be compared to a Volkswagen-like existential corporate crisis. In common with most European carmakers, JLR has had a rotten 12 months thanks to Donald Trump’s tariffs, luxury taxes in China, inflation in the cost of raw materials and, in its case, a big cyber-attack. Yet the company continues to talk bullishly about double-digit growth around the next corner as it prepares to launch five new models.
