Nissan plans to cut 10,000 jobs as for Sunderland workers fear for jobs

Eight thousand Nissan workers in the UK are anxiously awaiting news as to where big cuts by the Japanese car manufacturer will fall.

Before the company’s half-year earnings figures, which are expected to be published tomorrow, reports out of Tokyo indicate that Nissan could call for 10,000 redundancies worldwide, double the 4,800 cuts the manufacturer had previously indicated. The news is expected to come overnight.

Nissan — Japan’s second largest automotive group, behind Toyota — is one of the UK’s largest automotive employers alongside Jaguar Land Rover and BMW, which builds Minis and Rolls-Royces in the country, and Ford, which assembles car and van engines.

The UK is Nissan’s main European base, employing 7,000 people at its sprawling manufacturing facilities in Sunderland, where it assembles nearly 500,000 vehicles a year, most notably the best-selling Qashqai model. There are another 1,000 employees working for its sales and marketing operations headquartered in Maple Cross, Hertfordshire, as well as at its engineering and research technical centre at Cranfield, Bedfordshire, and its design studio, the birthplace of the Qashqai, in Paddington, London.

A spokesman for Nissan declined to comment on the reports, saying: “We have made no announcement.”

The future of Nissan in Sunderland has been a political hot potato ever since Theresa May cut a secret deal with Nissan’s boss at the time, Carlos Ghosn, giving assurances of support for the plant during the uncertainties of Brexit. That, however, did not prevent Nissan from pulling plans to bring its X-Trail 4×4 model to the Sunderland assembly lines.

The reports out of Tokyo indicated that the focus of the job cuts may be in the Americas. Its South American plants are seen to be of low profitability while the carmaker has also been reporting weak sales in the United States.

The job cuts come against a backdrop of crisis at the auto giant. It lost its charismatic leader and saviour, Mr Ghosn, amid allegations of financial wrongdoing at the turn of the year. That destabilised its cross-shareholding alliance with Renault, the French carmaker. It has long been argued, most notably by Emmanuel Macron when he was the French economics minister, that more Nissan models should be manufactured at Renault’s under-utilised plants in France.

Nissan’s financial performance has not been good. Global sales fell last year by 4.4 per cent to 5.5 million. That included a 9 per cent fall in the US and a near-15 per cent fall in Europe, where there has been a backlash against diesel vehicles, directly impacting the Nissan Qashqai. In the first three months of the year, Nissan’s earnings fell to a nine-year low with a warning of worse to come.

Government gives electric car charging a cash boost

The government is pumping nearly £40m into improving the infrastructure for electric vehicles despite a sharp drop in hybrid car sales.

The Department for Transport will invest in UK engineering to “transform” the network of electric charge points.

Wireless charging and “pop-up” pavement technology are among the investments being made.

Sales of plug-in hybrid vehicles slumped by 50.4% in June after the government scrapped a £2,500 grant.

But the DfT said it was “focusing on the cleanest, zero emission models”.

New UK car registrations for battery electric cars rose by 61.7% to 2,461 in June compared with the same month last year, according to figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

However, the drop in demand for plug-in hybrid cars, which fell from sales of 4,571 vehicles last June to 2,268 vehicles last month, meant that overall the alternatively fuelled vehicle sector shrank for the first time since April 2017.

A DfT spokeswoman said: “The plug-in car grant has supported the purchase of 180,000 new cars with over £700m, including 100,000 plug-in hybrids.”

As well as scrapping the grant for plug-in hybrid models last year, the government also reduced the subsidy for pure electric cars from £4,500 to £3,500.

It also announced last year that it would end the sale of all new conventional petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2040.

New projects

Nevertheless, the government is now investing £37m in a number of projects to make it easier for electric car owners to charge up their vehicles.

The government’s new investment marks the first anniversary of the launch of the government’s Road to Zero strategy, which wants “almost every car and van” in the UK to be zero emission by 2050.

It has handed £2.3m to a company called Char.gy, which is developing ways to deploy wireless charging technology on residential streets which would remove the need for trailing cables and additional infrastructure.

Urban Foresight has been awarded £3m to roll out “pop-up” chargers which are built into the pavement, which are designed to help drivers without access to off-street parking.

At present, the UK has a network of more than 24,000 public charging connectors in nearly 9,000 locations, according to figures from the Department for Transport.

Jaguar Land Rover recently announced that it would invest millions of pounds in the UK to build a range of electric cars at its Castle Bromwich plant in Birmingham.

However, its chief executive Professor Ralph Speth criticised the number of charging points for electric cars in the UK.

“The current charging infrastructure is not really sufficient to cover the country, nor the hotspots of the cities. The government has to govern the process,”.