Ford to cut nearly 4,000 jobs in Europe, including 1,300 in UK
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US carmaker blames losses on rising costs and need to switch to electric vehicle production
Staff and agencyTue 14 Feb 2023 15.49 GMT
The British car industry faces the prospect of further steep job cuts without urgent government support for electric vehicle investment, a union leader has warned, after Ford revealed 1,300 UK redundancies in its internal combustion operations.
The US carmaker said it planned to eliminate 3,800 product development and administration jobs across Europe, citing rising costs and the need to speed up its switch from petrol and diesel engines to electric vehicles.
Ford has said it would invest $50bn (£41bn) in electric car production by 2026. However, it must also decide what to do with operations built around the internal combustion engine before bans on sales of new petrol and diesel cars.
The Unite union, which represents many of the affected UK workers, said Ford’s move highlighted the risks to thousands of British car industry jobs working on internal combustion technology. About 100,000 UK automotive jobs are linked to petrol and diesel technology, according to the government-backed Faraday Institution.
Ford said about 2,300 jobs will be cut in Germany, 1,300 in the UK and 200 in the rest of Europe, adding that it intends to achieve the reductions through voluntary redundancies. Some 2,800 of the jobs will be engineering roles, while another 1,000 will be administrative jobs. Ford employs about 34,000 people in Europe, of which about 6,500 are in the UK.
Most of the UK job losses are expected to be in Ford’s technical centre in Dunton, Essex, which is in charge of developing the Transit van. Transit diesel sales are expected to continue for several years longer than cars with internal combustion engines, but there will be little need for design work on diesel engines once the last European emissions standards are met in time for a 2025 deadline.
