Thousands of jobs to go at MG Rover

Nearly 5,000 MG Rover employees will be made redundant this weekend, administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) have announced.

The company’s administrators announced that a rescue deal with Chinese car manufacturer Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) collapsed earlier today. The administrators received a letter from SAIC stating that the firm was “not willing to acquire either the whole or part of the business on a going concern basis.”

Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown have announced a £150 million support package for those workers affected by the collapse of MG Rover. Mr Blair and Mr Brown went to the company’s Longbridge plant in Birmingham to announce the plans.

Around 1,000 staff will remain at the plant to finish work on some uncompleted cars, while some others will remain at the engine-making subsidiary firm Powertrain and MG Sport and Racing.

MG Rover was forced into administration last week when talks with SAIC about a potential partnership broke down.

PwC had been hoping to renegotiate a deal with SAIC and earlier this week, the government had granted the firm a loan of £6.5 million in order to keep the business afloat for another week and stop almost 6,000 employers at the Longbridge plant from losing their jobs.

PwC said that the Longbridge plant would be ‘mothballed’ and said that they would seek to sell off parts of the company. The administrators said that around 70 separate offers had been made for parts of MG Rover, but no money had been offered yet.

Tony Woodley, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), described the news as a “devastating development” and said it left the Longbridge employees, as well as 18,000 supply firm workers, whose jobs could also be affected by the collapse of MG Rover, facing a “bleak time”. He said: “The one in a million chance we felt our people had has now been taken away.”

(KMcA)