This is the home of the Luton van, latterly Vauxhall/GM, but a distinct and popular type of commercial vehicle which dates as far back to the early Bedfordshire 2.0-ton lorry of the 1920s which had a closed box instead of an open tray. Luton was where these vehicles have been manufactured for 100 years.
The Secretary of State for Business and Trade, Jonathan Reynolds, has absolutely no experience in this field. Judging from his CV, after his degree in politics and modern history, he ‘trained’ as a solicitor but didn’t actually qualify as a solicitor, unless I’ve missed something? It’s so difficult to tell with ministers’ CVs these days. I suppose I should congratulate him for his honesty, although I’m sure that he knows how the Law Society operates. I wonder what his CV looked like when he was applying to be the candidate? Hmm….
Most of his career, before getting a safe seat, consisted of being employed by his local council for a while before working for James Purnell MP, whose seat he inherited. Obviously a very talented chap with a wide range of experience?
This is the minister who gets to decide on having a conversation with Stellantis before they finally pull the plug on their plant in Luton where they make vans. It’s probably too late, and Mr Reynolds must have missed the announcement a few months ago that Stellantis were really unhappy about getting fined £15,000 for every petrol or diesel car they sold in the UK.
The press offers ‘1,100 jobs to go in Luton’, when it should be reporting, ‘Over 3,000 jobs to go when Stellantis closes plant in Luton’. The lack of curiosity and fundamental inability to properly investigate stories in our press/media never ceases to astonish me. I remember when this wasn’t the case.
I’m not an expert on the automotive industry. I used to know a chap whose family business turned out mudflaps for trucks and buses, and I also knew somebody who had a distributorship in the car business. I have a rough idea of how manufacturers source components, and how components suppliers/manufacturers source their raw materials. Unlike our Secretary for Business and Trade, I’ve worked with a few companies engaged in producing stuff and learned how they source inputs, put them all together and make a profit. I even went so far as to invest and work in such a company for a few years, which was a fascinating experience.
My basic knowledge, and experience, tells me that a loss of 1,100 jobs in the Luton plant will, at the very least, result in another 2,000 job losses in the supply chain of companies linked to that plant, and further losses of jobs in distributorships around the country, not to mention the local economy of Luton. The total of job losses will probably look more like 3,000+.
The jobs are being sacrificed on the ‘Net Zero’ altar because Stellantis cannot carry the extra burden of being fined £15,000 per ICE vehicle which it sells if it’s not selling 22% EVs this year, a percentage which rises to 30% over the next three years. It’s a bit of a bugger given the reluctance of consumers to buy EVs.
This means, in practice, that Stellantis might make a gross profit of £5,000 on a £30,000 car and then lose £10,000 on the deal after having to pay £15,000 to HMG.
Ford US have just stopped making EVs in the car range as they worked out that they were losing $130,000 per vehicle. This is extraordinary.
It’s clearly not commercially sustainable. VW is closing three plants in Germany because they’re hemorrhaging cash. The boss of Mercedes is on record as saying that there simply isn’t enough cobalt in the world to supply an entire global EV fleet of Mercedes vehicles at current levels, never mind the other brands.
Global copper production would have to be scaled up 1,500% to meet requirements which is ambitious, to say the least. Lithium and Rare Earth Elements are, as the name suggests, not ubiquitous, and the major supplier is the Peoples’ Republic of China….
It’s nuts! It’s nuts zero…..I would love to forecast how this is going to pan out, and at what stage the Western economies are forced to make a major shift, and whether this will happen before they’ve crashed so much of their manufacturing industries that the costs of rehabilitation become too great. It’s not a happy scenario.
