Peugeot to stop making cars in the UK

[Admin]

So Ryton is finally closing. It was bound to happen soone ror later as the plant is small and old fashioned and no matter how productive the workers, the costs here are never going to be as cheap as in Eastern Europe.

Coming so soon after the end of Rover it does start to make the industrial landscape of the midlands look like a wasteland.

Should Peugeot have invested in the plant?
Would they have treated french workers like this?
Is this only the start of a wave of large plant closures as manufacturing deserts the UK?

Comments?

[504gld]

It does seem a little odd thinking back from the comment Andrew Didlick made at the AGM in reference to the 206 and Ryton - in saying it would the last plant to be building the model. With IKCO making the new 206SD, a project which couldnt of been designed overnight makes you wonder if it was all on the cards for a long time, and that Ryton back then had no future. I suppose NDKs have to come from someplace too for Africa etc, and UK would seem not a logistical solution either. Perhaps the UK unions still have some reputation from the BL days that cant get away from and PSA simply are fed up? who can say? I've never worked in a manufacturing industry and never North of Bristol either so I don't know about the work ethics, but just listening to the news the impression it paints for me is the unions have done no favours. If Ryton's staff we asked to increase productivity and quality when perhaps the questions of why was it not satisfactory before? what was holding it back to generate that situation - it seemed to be resolved but was it too late had PSA had enough, and used to power to say up yours,.... bothered!?

[Donaldiesel]

For Immediate Release ­ 16:00hrs 19th April 2006

Commission stalled Peugeot’s UK expansion plans as British taxpayers build new plant in Slovakia

The European Commission stalled £188m of extra investment in Peugeot’s Ryton plant in the UK while conducting its longest ever inquiry into state aid,while at the same time it used cash supplied by British taxpayers to subsidise the building of the Trnava plant in Slovakia, U.K. Independence Party transport spokesman Mike Nattrass MEP said today

Mr Nattrass said that Peugeot had submitted a request for state aid in December 2002, which the British government had referred to the European Commission. In what the DTI described as the ‘longest case to win approval’, a decision was not forthcoming until early 2005, by which time Slovakia was on the brink of accession to the European Union. The Commission has approved E105m of state subsidy for the Trnava plant.

Mr Nattrass continued, “Effectively British taxpayers have subsidised the export of their own jobs while the Commission dragged its feet over a decision which could have saved the livelihoods of thousands of my constituents.

“Peugeot was seeking state aid for Ryton in order to manufacture its replacement for the 206 range of vehicles. Had the Commission acted in a timely fashion and permitted the aid package requested, Peugeot would have invested £187 million in the West Midlands, and the future of the plant would be secure.

“Instead, the Commission has decided that Trnava deserves the jobs more than Coventry, with the British government nothing more than a helpless bystander. This is the second time in less than a year that this has happened to British car-making, after the Commission halted any plans for state aid for Rover.

“How can our democratically elected parliament at Westminster have given the unelected European Commission the power to play god with British workers jobs?”

ENDS

Notes to Editors:

For details of the Commission decision, please see
europa.eu.int/eur-lex/lex/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32005D03
01:EN:HTML

UKIP MEP Graham Booth made a speech to the European Parliament on this subject on the 13th March 2006, the text of which is appended below.

For further information, please contact:

Mike Nattrass MEP, 07770-538538

Mark Croucher, UKIP Press Office, 0207-222-9365 or 07960-584161

Text of Graham Booth MEP speech:

I wish to focus on the concept of direct State Aid as a tool of regional development, to which Mr Hutchinson alludes in his report.

It is a concept very closely allied to the whole idea of structural funds and regional cohesion and my country, the United Kingdom, is paying a heavy price within the EU as a result.

The rapporteur calls for companies which have received public aid and have then relocated within the EU to be blocked from receiving state aid or structural funding for seven years.

But what of respected companies which have applied quite properly for state aid, received no answer from the Commission within a reasonable period, and have then relocated to another part of the EU, which fits in better with
Brussels' idea of cohesion and therefore is completely free of the same obstructions?

In 2002, Peugeot asked the European Commission to approve a state aid package to build the new 207 model at Ryton in the English West Midlands. More than two years later, with still no answer forthcoming from the
Commission, Peugeot gave up waiting and announced that the 207 would be built in France and Slovakia.

No doubt Brussels saw this as economic mission accomplished.

Meanwhile, Ryton faces an uncertain future, once production ceases on the old 206, built there so well - and so competitively - up to now. If this factory closes, after many years of production under various owners, I guess
one can describe it as a relocation of sorts, but it is hardly Peugeot's fault.

Perhaps instead the Commission should be banned for seven years from pronouncing on state aid. That would certainly be cheered in the English West Midlands, whose skilled workers are suffering at the hands of EU
economic policy.

Rubbing salt into its workforce’s wounds comes the news that Peugeot has reached an agreement with Gaya Motors to build the 206 in Indonesia ­ along with unconfirmed reports that the 207 will be built there too.

Nothing could illustrate better the illiteracy of EU economics.

end

[chugchug]

A very unfortunate example of EU policy helping us!!

[504gld]

Peugeot workers launch campaign



Peugeot car workers are urging the public to join a campaign to save the Ryton plant near Coventry.

The French car giant stunned the UK motor industry when it announced the closure of the factory with the loss of 2,300 jobs.

Union members are planning to stage demonstrations outside Peugeot dealerships in the area as part of a drive to urge the French firm to reconsider its plans.

Unions have drawn up an alternative proposal which they said would prevent closure, including moving to a single production shift this summer to allow workers to leave if they wanted to.

A new model would be built at Ryton in 2009/10, when the factory would operate on up to four shifts, the unions suggested.

Tony Woodley, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, said: "This plan offers a future worth fighting for.

"We are taking the case for Ryton to the highest levels of government, and we will put it to the company's top management too. We are talking about saving the plant, not surrender.

"That is why we are bringing our case on to the streets of Coventry., and we are ready to take our campaign across the country if we have to, if it means saving Ryton and giving British manufacturing industry and its employees real hope for the future."

[504gld]

OK demonstrations outside dealerships, perhaps they could set up a table and offer real advice how to fix a 307, but seriously what do they hope to build in the future? nobody is buying 1007 or many 107 and 207 plans will have been long set in stone building new production lines. Perhaps they should be campaining for people to not buy 207 and buy 206 which they make, more demand = more work.

[Admin]

I can't see Peugeot changing their minds, whatever the demonstrations. The fact is they no longer need r want Ryton. French factories will stay open fo rthe simple reason that Peugeot is a French company. Any British company would do no less here if their number one market (the home market) would be threatened by plant closures at home. Peugeot know that they will only loose a few hundred sales in the UK over this decision.

If the UK had a domestic car industry instead of merely an assembly industry for foreign companies we wouldn't be at the mercy of decisions made elsewhere. I don't really beleive in subsidies to multi national companies that make billions of pounds in profit anyway. It distorts the cost of the car, making it artificially cheap, it distorts the decisions on where to manufacter and in the long run it often fails to secure any future. What if the British government, instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on loans, grants and now the huge cost of looking after the unemployed of Rover, had simply taken the company over, installed some decent management and got everything going.
Nationalised industries are not neccesarily a bad or inefficient thing! and we'd have a car industry still!