Ford to Cut 1,300 UK Jobs by 2025

Ford has today announced a reduction its UK workforce, with a cut of 1,300 UK jobs in total. This is all part of a wider streamlining of the European workforce as the company pushes forward its plans for transferring operations to purely providing electric vehicles in the future.

The announcement was made today by Martin Sander, the General Manager for Ford Model e in the manufacturer’s European market. Overall, Ford Europe is planning to cut jobs to the tune of 2,800 across the European continent, mainly in engineering and product development sections as Ford attempts to resize its European sector.

With Ford now sharing developing EV technology with Volkswagen, in particular, the use of the VW Group’s MEB modular chassis platform (which is also being used by Audi, Skoda and SEAT), there is arguably less of a need for quite so many individuals within Ford’s product development teams.

The split across Ford Europe sees approximately 1,000 engineering job losses in the UK and another 1,700 losses in Germany, with the remainder being made up from other operations across Europe. There will be a further 300 job losses in UK administration areas as Ford also cuts this sector by 1,000 across Europe.

While the automotive industry’s move to electric vehicle production was bound to have some sort of knock-on effect, this has come as quite a shock to the UK automotive market. Ford is of course an American company and with that in mind, Ford says that it can, with streamlining, continue to develop required technology at home and successfully modify the tech where required for the European market.

Going forward, Sander says that Ford will be continuing to focus on developing a portfolio of electric vehicles to take the company forward and remain able to compete in an increasingly competitive market, while maintaining a slightly smaller range, based on the long-standing American heritage of the company. To allay some fears, he also says that Ford remains committed to Europe.

Inevitably, the rising cost of parts and increasing energy costs plus the global economic situation has had an influence on shaping Ford’s future plans.

Perhaps some good news is that Sander has made it very clear that while the well-established Ford Technical Centre based at Dunton in Essex will be affected, the centre will continue to remain a big part of Ford’s plans.

Sander described the cuts as a result of growth-based action to allow Ford to become leaner and therefore able to provide a more competitive cost structure in Europe. Ford plans to resize its European operations by 2025.

Images: ford.com