‘I don’t know if we’ll function a day after Brexit’

BREXIT is due to happen on the 29th March, next year. Currently, I do not even know if any of our manufacturing facilities in the UK will be able to function on the 30th.

Like many British companies our supply chains reach deep into Europe. Bluntly, we will not be able to build cars if the motorway to and from Dover becomes a car park, where the vehicle carrying parts – vital to our processes – is stationary.

Our plants in Solihull, Castle Bromwich, Wolverhampton and Halewood, produce 3,000 cars a day, using 25 million components. We are dependent on “just in time” processes.

Any friction at our borders puts our production in jeopardy – at a cost of £60 million a day. That is a world where the bureaucracy of a customs official becomes more important than the craft of an engineer.

Frictionless trade is not an aspiration, but a necessity for Jaguar Land Rover.

Unfettered access to the Single Market is as important a part to our business, as wheels are to our cars.

We are a quintessentially British company. That is our identity. Our commitment to this country is deep.

Yet now, thanks to higher costs and the UK’s poor productivity rates, it is thousands of pounds cheaper to produce vehicles in Slovakia than Solihull.

What decisions will I be forced to make if Brexit means not merely that costs go up, but that we cannot physically build cars on time and on budget in the UK?

Be assured, we are firmly committed to the UK – it’s our home.

But the calculation – and anyone can do the maths – that a hard Brexit will cost Jaguar Land Rover – on its own – more than £1.2 billion a year.

Wiping out profit. Destroying investment in the autonomous, connected, electric vision we want to share.

Six months from Brexit and uncertainty means that many companies are being forced to make decisions about their businesses that will not be reversed, whatever the outcome, just to survive.

Talk diesel, petrol, hybrid or electric. Free, frictionless trade and clarity are the paramount fuels for our business.

More than 40,000 people in the UK alone are directly employed by Jaguar and Land Rover. Indirectly, a quarter of a million households rely on our success. They are not the only ones at risk. So too, are the futures of hundreds of thousands of people in this country who will enjoy even more prosperous futures if industry and our supply chains can grasp the opportunities to become world leaders in these new technologies.

Manufacturing is not the proportion of the UK’s wealth that it once was. Now just ten per cent of GDP.

We need to reverse that decline. As a country we cannot just rely on the financial and service sectors.

Professor Dr Ralf Speth, Chief Executive Officer, Jaguar

Land Rover

Unfettered access to the Single Market is as important a part to our business, as wheels are to our cars. Dr Ralf D Speth