Jaguar Land Rover has opened a voluntary redundancy programme for salaried and management staff, the company confirmed on Saturday, as The Sunday Times reported the plan could remove as many as 4,000 jobs over two years.
The British carmaker, owned by India’s Tata Motors, did not confirm a number and said it would share details with employees first; a formal announcement is expected on Monday, according to The Sunday Times, which first reported the plan.
A person with knowledge of the matter told the Financial Times that as many as 4,000 employees would be affected and that jobs at the company’s production facilities would not be touched.
“Today, we informed our colleagues and trade union partners that JLR is opening a voluntary redundancy programme offering salaried and management team members the opportunity to leave the business,” a spokesperson said in a statement carried by the BBC and the Press Association.
The company tied the programme directly to the cost plan it set out in June: “As we deliver the next phase of our strategy, we need to adapt to evolving global market conditions while targeting approximately £1.7 billion of savings over the next two years and reduce break-evens to 300,000 vehicles. To achieve this, we must further simplify our organisation, improve efficiency and build greater resilience.”
The statement did not rule out compulsory redundancies, the BBC noted.
JLR employs about 30,000 people in the UK out of about 44,000 worldwide, so 4,000 departures would equal 13.3% of the UK workforce and 9.1% of the global total.
The Government Response
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said on Sunday that he had spoken to CEO PB Balaji and would meet the company’s leadership early this week, but ruled out state support to preserve headcount.
“A company the size of JLR, which is a huge British success story, at various times in its business cycle, the number of, directly, people it employs will change,” Reynolds told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, adding: “Of course you want to mitigate any job losses.”
Asked whether financial support could protect the roles, he replied: “Not if it’s to bail people out. If it’s about long-term investment in the future, we do invest alongside industry on that.”
A government spokesperson said ministers understood “this will be an uncertain and concerning time for affected workers, their families and wider communities,” and pointed to lower industrial electricity bills, £4 billion in capital and R&D funding for zero-emission vehicle manufacturing and a £2 billion consumer EV grant.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham, who said she and Reynolds would meet Balaji this week after “intensive government discussions over the weekend,” blamed “years of underinvestment, unsustainable ZEV mandates and high industrial energy costs” and said it “cannot be acceptable that workers again are made to pay the price.”
Unite said it had been “pivotal” in securing the £1.5 billion government-guaranteed loan facility that followed last year’s cyberattack.
A Year After the Shutdown
The programme opens almost exactly a year after JLR halted production at every plant on September 1, 2025, following a cyber intrusion detected at the end of August.
Factories stayed idle for five weeks, and output did not return to normal levels until mid-November.
The company booked £196 million in direct exceptional costs from the incident in the quarter to September 2025, alongside £42 million for an earlier voluntary redundancy scheme covering up to 500 UK management roles announced in July 2025.
The Cyber Monitoring Centre has estimated the wider cost to the UK economy at £1.9 billion.
To shore up liquidity, JLR signed a £2 billion bank bridge facility on September 22, 2025 and, in October, the £1.5 billion commercial loan guaranteed by UK Export Finance under the previous Starmer government.
A further tranche of savings announced in July this year involved fewer than 300 departures, the BBC reported.
The Numbers Behind the Cuts
JLR‘s revenue fell 20.9% to £22.9 billion in the year to March 31, 2026, and profit before tax and exceptional items dropped to £14 million from £2.5 billion.
The company posted a £244 million loss after tax for the year, its first annual net loss in about five years, and burned £2.2 billion of free cash.
Wholesale volumes fell 23.2% to about 307,900 vehicles, against a break-even target of 300,000 that management says it has not yet reached.
The first quarter of the new financial year, to June 30, brought revenue of £6.0 billion, down 9.6%, and pre-tax profit before exceptionals of £109 million, down 68.9%, on an adjusted EBIT margin of 2.8%.
Free cash flow was negative £998 million in the quarter and cash fell to £1.7 billion from £2.8 billion, with total liquidity of £5.9 billion including undrawn facilities.
JLR blamed the quarter on a fire at a component supplier’s factory in Norway that briefly stopped Range Rover and Range Rover Sport assembly at Solihull, disruption from the Middle East conflict and the run-out of legacy Jaguar models, while discounting rose to 7.1% of revenue from 4.1%.
Quarterly wholesales of 79,300 annualise to roughly 317,000 units, leaving little margin against the 300,000 break-even the savings programme is meant to deliver.
The £1.7 Billion Plan
Balaji, who took over from Adrian Mardell in November 2025, told investors at Gaydon on June 17 that the savings would come from three areas: delivered material cost, warranty expense and IT and digital productivity.
He said break-even had earlier been brought down to 300,000 to 320,000 units before US tariffs, currency moves, commodity inflation and the shift toward electric models pushed the cost base back up; the Financial Times put the current break-even at about 380,000 vehicles a year.
Guidance for the current year is revenue of about £26 billion, an adjusted EBIT margin of around 4% and roughly break-even free cash flow, with investment of £3.7 billion.
The tariff on UK-built vehicles entering the US fell to 10% from 27.5% under the UK-US trade agreement, though Defender, built in Nitra, Slovakia, does not benefit; the company has signed a memorandum of understanding with Stellantis to explore Defender-brand products for the US market.
Launches Still to Come
The redundancy round lands in the middle of the most concentrated product cycle in the company’s recent history.
Orders for the Range Rover Electric opened on September 2 at £154,070 in the UK and $138,000 before destination in the US, roughly a year later than first planned, with the Range Rover GT on the new EMA platform due in 2027.
The Range Rover Sport Electric and the Jaguar Type 01, the first production car of the relaunched all-electric Jaguar brand, are both scheduled for reveal or launch before year-end.
The 500-job programme of July 2025 was the company’s largest since January 2019, when then-CEO Ralf Speth cut 4,500 mostly office-based roles under the £2.5 billion “Charge” programme amid falling diesel and China sales.
