Jaguar Land Rover cuts 4,000 jobs, reuses the 2019 letter
The carmaker says its new redundancy programme has been rebuilt to the specification of its last one, with the paperwork restored rather than redesigned.
Jaguar Land Rover has confirmed 4,000 job cuts and says the programme is a faithful rebuild of its 2019 redundancy round, down to the paper stock. A newly appointed director of heritage restructuring says twenty-six pages have been carried over unaltered. Union officials report the letter is accurate to the original.
The print room at Jaguar Land Rover's Solihull site has been asked to track down its old paper stock. Not a new batch. The specific weight and shade used for letters sent out in 2019, which a supplier in Coventry stopped making some time around the pandemic.
This is the detail the company wants understood. Britain's largest carmaker confirmed on Monday that it will cut about 4,000 jobs over two years, part of a plan to save £1.7bn. It also confirmed that the programme is not a new one.
It is, in the company's own description, a heritage reissue.
Jaguar Land Rover has appointed a director of heritage restructuring, Marguerite Halliwell-Speke, to oversee what she calls a period-correct rebuild of the 2019 redundancy round. Twenty-six pages of the earlier plan have been carried over without alteration, including a paragraph about the outlook for diesel.
"Anyone can write a new restructuring," Halliwell-Speke said. "Very few organisations have the discipline to restore an old one properly."
Original specification
The company says the exercise required real research. Three of the managers who ran the earlier round were traced and consulted, one of them by video call from retirement in Portugal.
The consultation meetings will be held in the same rooms where possible. Where a room has since been converted, staff will be told which room it used to be.
Halliwell-Speke confirmed the letters will not carry a QR code. "That would be a modern intrusion," she said. "The 2019 letter was a single sheet, folded twice, and it did its job."
Only one concession to the present has been approved. The envelopes will be recyclable.
The background nobody wants recited again
The trading picture is genuinely bad, which is the part that makes the theatre so hard to watch. Donald Trump's tariffs have made the American market a problem. A cyber-attack shut production down and the effects are still working through the accounts. Tata, the Indian conglomerate that owns the business, wants the savings.
None of this is unfamiliar. The Midlands has been told before that a great car company must be made smaller in order to survive, and has watched what came next.
1980.
"Very few organisations have the discipline to restore an old one properly."
Roy Tunstall, a regional officer who has sat through more of these than he can date accurately, described the announcement as a body blow for workers and then paused for a long time.
"I have the 2019 letter in a drawer," he said. "I kept it because I thought it would be useful. I did not think it would be reprinted."
Reaction
Business analysts have been broadly kind about the execution and unkind about everything else. Priya Vellacott, who covers European carmakers for a consultancy in the City, called it competent work on a tired script.
"The beats arrive exactly where you expect them," she said. "Tariffs. Cyber-attack. Efficiency. A commitment to the skilled workforce, delivered in the same sentence as the number of people leaving it."
Vellacott said the only surprise was the honesty. "Most companies pretend the plan is new. This one has put the year on the box."
Local reaction has been quieter. A shop steward at a plant canteen said staff had spent Wednesday morning comparing the announcement to the last one, line by line, and finding it broadly accurate.
Not everyone approves of the restoration approach. A supplier in the West Midlands, who asked not to be named because he still wants the work, said the fidelity was the insulting part.
"They have gone to enormous trouble to get the paper right," he said. "Nobody went to that trouble over the jobs."
What comes next
Halliwell-Speke would not rule out further reissues. She confirmed that earlier programmes going back several decades have been catalogued, and that some are in better condition than others.
"There is material from the 1990s we would need to handle carefully," she said. "The language has not aged well. The logic is intact."
She was asked whether a company that keeps reprinting the same document might consider writing a different one. She said that was a question for the product side.
Jaguar Land Rover still makes some of the most desirable cars in the world, in factories staffed by people who are very good at making them. That has never once been the thing under discussion.
The paper supplier in Coventry has been contacted. He has one pallet left.1
Footnotes.
He has been told it is for a retrospective, which is not untrue. ↩
