Jaguar’s boss isn’t scaremongering: the UK car industry is in big trouble

‘I’m afraid I think he’s making it up,’ was the retort of Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin on Monday’s Today programme to the claim by Ralf Speth, boss of Jaguar Land Rover, that a bad Brexit deal could put tens of thousands of jobs at risk in JLR and its suppliers, and cost his company £1.2 billion a year. In the same speech last week, Speth pointed out that the lack of any sort of Brexit clarity means he has no idea whether his UK factories will be able to operate on 30 March next year — or whether even the ‘tiny’ border delays Jenkin concedes are likely will cripple the just-in-time systems on which the likes of JLR and the BMW Mini factory at Cowley depend. If just one truckload of Spanish-made headlights is stuck at the docks, the line could come to a halt: it’s as simple as that.

‘Scaremongering,’ said Jenkin, going on to expatiate about the smoothness of ‘drive-through borders’ elsewhere. To which Speth responded, later on Monday, by putting 1,000 workers at his Castle Brom-wich factory on a three-day week until Christmas. In doing so, he spoke of broader ‘headwinds’ rather than Brexit specifics: this comes at a time when sales of diesel cars have slumped (partly because governments won’t acknowledge the merits of new ‘clean diesel’) and the industry is grappling with the EU’s ‘real-world’ emissions and fuel consumption tests, which have disrupted production and (because higher emission readings mean higher tax charges) knocked a huge hole in the company car market.

The point is this: the £80 billion, 800,000-worker UK automotive sector is already in a fragile state, to which Brexit is adding paralysing uncertainty. It’s an industry that has developed since the 1980s as the embodiment of globalisation and the flagship of Europe’s single market — and it has no clue how much change it is about to have to cope with.