Ford cuts 800 jobs in UK as part of Europe-wide cull

Another 800 jobs are to go at Ford, just 18 months after the company cut one fifth of its UK workforce.
The hundreds of jobs going this time represent 15 per cent of the 5,100 remaining people the company employs in the UK.
Last spring the US motor company made 1,300 people of its UK workforce redundant from the 6,400 it then employed.
The latest round of redundancies, part of 4,000 jobs across Europe, comes as the company struggles to make the transition to retiring petrol and diesel engine cars and moving to a zero-emission future, despite its bold and unfulfilled promises to be an all-electric brand in Europe in 2025.
“Making this announcement isn’t something that anybody wants to do and I appreciate it will have a very significant impact on our employees,” said Lisa Brankin, managing director of Ford in the UK.
Dave Johnston, the Ford of Europe director in charge of “transformation” at the company this side of the Atlantic, said: “It is critical to take difficult but decisive action to ensure Ford’s future competitiveness in Europe.”
Though Ford has not assembled a car in the UK for more than 20 years, a decade ago — when it was still making Transit vans in Britain and building petrol engines in south Wales — it employed more than 16,000 people.
In the last round of redundancies, its world-renowned research and development centre at Dunton in Essex was more than decimated by the job cuts.
The company did not stipulate where the jobs cull was falling this time but said it was looking for voluntary redundancies.