The JLR Effect

For many months now, the Midlands media has been full of stories about luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover going from strength to strength as it drives the UK economy, particularly here in the Midlands.

High-level development by the brand has ensured that its Solihull plant represents one of the largest manufacturing growth stories in the UK for a generation – almost trebling production and doubling its workforce in five years.

Back in April, Jaguar Land Rover’s Solihull plant welcomed the Jaguar brand to the site for the first time in its 70-year history as it began the production of the all-new Jaguar XE with the official opening of state-of-the-art £500m ‘factory within a factory’.

The Jaguar XE was hailed as being of huge importance to the British automotive supply chain thanks to an additional £4bn worth of contracts committed to 55 UK based suppliers. Those suppliers, based all over the country, provided more than half of the components to this all-new model in the Jaguar line-up.

And the trickle-down effect continues. The past six months have seen Harris Lamb support regional businesses forming part of the JLR supply chain. Magna Automotive have taken on a ten-year lease at a 200,000sq ft logistics building on the Big Berry development at Droitwich, while a further 40,000sq ft warehouse on the Park Farm Industrial Estate at Howard Road, Redditch, was leased by Lear Automotive on a five-year term linked to a contract servicing JLR ‘s Castle Bromwich site.

It’s well documented that the UK’s manufacturing industry has boomed in the past eighteen months, while all of the UK’s Top Five fastest-growing economies can be found in the Midlands, where engineering and advanced manufacturing is powering a revival in the regions’ economies,

Without question, JLR continues to be a powerhouse that fellow manufacturers across the UK both aspire to and owe their own success to. Long may the JLR Effect continue.