Luxury car maker Jaguar Land Rover is axing up to 500 management jobs in the UK amid a slump in sales and trade tariff woes.
The Tata-owned firm said around 1.5% of its UK workforce of more than 33,000 would be affected by the job cuts, which are going as part of a voluntary redundancy programme for managers in the UK.
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) declined to say which sites would be affected, but said the role reductions were spread across the firm’s management team.
The group has sites in locations including Solihull and Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, Halewood in Merseyside, Gaydon in Warwickshire and Whitley in Coventry.
It comes after JLR revealed last week that retail sales plunged 15.1% in the three months to June after a temporary pause in exports to the US and the planned wind-down of older Jaguar models, while wholesale sales dropped by 10.7%.
The company said the significant fall in sales was partly driven by the pause in shipments to the US in April after US President Donald Trump’s administration introduced new tariff plans.
In April, the US government said it would launch an additional 25% tariff on car imports into the US, in an effort to encourage more car production within the country.
However, the US and UK have since agreed a deal which would see a lower 10% tariff applied to the first 100,000 UK-manufactured cars imported into the US each year.
UK cars imported to the US beyond this threshold will however face a 27.5% tariff.
A spokesperson for JLR said: “JLR regularly offers eligible employees voluntary redundancy programmes.
“Through this limited UK voluntary redundancy programme for managers, JLR is aligning its leadership workforce for the business’s current and future needs.
“We are grateful to the Government for delivering at speed the new UK-US trade deal, which gives us the confidence to invest £3.5 billion per annum to realise our strategy which is delivering.”
The Government had hailed the recent UK-US trade deal for helping protect thousands of British jobs in affected sectors.
JLR halted new shipments to the US in April but restarted exports in early May amid hopes that a trade deal for the sector would be struck.
The car firm saw wholesale sales in North America drop by 12.2% year-on-year after the pause.
But wholesale sales in the UK were also heavily down – tumbling 25.5% in the second quarter – after the planned wind-down of older Jaguar models.
Jaguar stopped selling new cars in the UK late last year as it shifts its production to new electric models, which are set to go on sale in 2026.
