There is something of an air of relief hanging over Jaguar and Land Rover this week following their sale to India’s Tata Group.
Although Unite-TGWU’s Tony Woodley was somewhat lacking in enthusiasm, commenting that he would rather Ford had kept the car makers “in the family”, he did admit that if a sale had to take place then “Tata was the best option”.
Tata has already issued a statement saying that it has no plans to bring in its own senior managers and that it does not anticipate any major changes to its 16,000 new employees’ terms and conditions.
It has even promised to keep existing factories open until at least 2011 when Ford’s current five-year plan comes to an end, and plans to invest a further £1 billion over the next four or five years.
The Liverpool Echo, which has something of an interest in the deal as 2,200 of the affected employees work at Halewood, points out that this marks the end of Ford’s 45-year association with the plant, which was the largest in the world when in opened in 1963.
But on the whole, its report and the response of workers at Halewood itself have been positive.
The deal hasn’t impressed everyone, though. Without a hint of sour grapes about the state of the American car industry, US-based CNN cheerfully reports, via its India correspondent, that Tata is buying into “40 years of trouble”, arguing that endemic labour problems have thwarted all but the briefest of revivals since Jaguar and Land Rover became part of British Leyland back in 1968.
Tata’s assurances that it doesn’t plan to take an axe to its workforce gets something of a thumbs down. According to CNN:
“This could, of course, mean that Tata is seen - especially by British trade union leaders - as a soft option who will let workforces carry on as usual. Land Rover has had three years of record sales for Tata to build on. But there’s no telling how long the status quo can last, especially if demand slackens in the United States and elsewhere and Ratan Tata has to institute cutbacks at the luxury car makers.”/
The news from the markets meanwhile is also far from encouraging. At the time of writing, Tata shares had lost 6% of their value in a single day – the biggest fall in a day of otherwise gentle decline on India’s stock exchange.
But what about the politicians? Well, although prime minister Gordon Brown met a delegation from the Confederation of Indian Industry on Tuesday, just as the deal was going through, there has been not a word from Number Ten about the takeover.
Neither is there anything to be seen on the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform website.
No matter what CNN may think, it’s all a long way from the days of British Leyland, when the sale of Land Rover or Jaguar to a foreign buyer would have been enough to bring down governments.
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