Tata Steel's UK operations have made a separate request for a £500m loan from taxpayers, while other companies seeking bespoke support packages include McLaren, Petroineos and Virgin Atlantic Airways.
The fact that JLR is owned by Tata, the wealthy Indian conglomerate, may complicate matters, however. Whitehall's position on JLR's latest loan request was unclear this weekend, although it is unlikely that ministers would allow a company as vital to the UK's manufacturing capability as vital as JLR to collapse. :: Listen to the Daily podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Spreaker Podcast Due to your consent preferences, you’re not able to view this. That came just weeks after it reported a £3.6bn annual loss. Last summer, the company secured £500m of government-guaranteed loans in a deal with UK Export Finance.
It was unclear this weekend how those figures had changed in the seven weeks since then. JLR added that it had ended the financial year with cash and investments of £3.6bn, while it also had undrawn bank facilities of £1.9bn. In April, it said total retail sales for the fourth quarter, ending 31 March, had slumped by almost 31% to 110,000 vehicles as a result of the pandemic. Its cash position has been made far less robust by the pandemic, with the ratings agency Standard & Poor estimating recently that the company was burning through £1bn every month. It operates three main production sites: at Castle Bromwich and Solihull in the Midlands, and Halewood on Merseyside.Īpproximately 20,000 of its employees have been furloughed under the government's emergency wage subsidy programme, according to a spokesman, although about 2000 employees at the Solihull site returned to work this week. Image: Jaguar's Castle Bromwich manufacturing facility