Toyota to create 1,500 UK jobs in £100m project to build new family car
Toyota is to create 1,500 jobs as part of a £100million investment to build a new family car in Britain.
David Cameron welcomed the move as ‘fantastic news and a massive vote of confidence for UK manufacturing’.
Speaking during his first visit to the Japanese car-maker’s UK factory in Burnaston, Derbyshire, yesterday, the Prime Minister said the announcement was a testament to the ‘renaissance’ in the UK motor industry, which he hoped would be part of a ‘broader recovery’ and a ‘rebalancing of the economy’.
In the driving seat: David Cameron at the Derbyshire plant yesterday
The new car, to be built in two years’ time, will replace the small Auris family hatchback. No decision has been made as to whether it will retain the name.
Of 1,500 new posts created over the next two years, 500 will be recruited in 2012. Currently, 550 cars a day are made at the plant, with last year seeing 137,000 rolling off the production line of a plant with the capacity for 170,000.
The £100million injection takes the company’s total investment in the UK to more than £2.1billion since 1989. Cameron said: ‘This investment and the jobs it will create provide a terrific boost not just to the local economy but to the whole country, and is a tribute to the great skill, hard work and sheer professionalism shown by the Toyota workforce. Toyota’s commitment to the UK shows the growing strength of the UK car industry – it is our great British success story.’
The Prime Minister toured the factory, met apprentices and their supervisors and fitted a badge on a Toyota Avensis.
‘In recent years our economy has been too unbalanced,’ he said. ‘There has been too much emphasis on finance, on housing, on debt, on immigration, rather than actually making things, building an economy where we are manufacturing, building up our skills, adding real value and selling to the world.’
Change will be difficult after an ‘easy boom based on debt and finance and all-too-focused on the south-east of England’, he admitted – but it remains vital to ‘rebalance and reskill’ the economy so that the UK can sell to countries experiencing rapid growth.
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