JLR says 3,000 staff already agreed voluntary redundancy under two-year plan

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has said its voluntary redundancy programme is going “strangely to plan” and about 3,000 staff are already leaving the company, as bosses said the workforce will still have the “talent and skill” to drive the company forward.

The luxury British carmaker announced in September that it was targeting a reduction of about 4,000 jobs across its global workforce over the next two years.

This was part of efforts to reduce labour costs and find savings worth £1.7 billion.

In an update on Friday, JLR’s chief financial officer, Richard Molyneux, said there were about 3,000 members of staff signed up to leave the company during the remainder of the financial year.

The vast majority will leave by the end of November.

There were enough additional “expressions of interest and applications” to address the remaining 1,000 roles and reach its target, he said.

“The programme has gone strangely according to plan. Not an awful lot has gone according to plan this year, but this programme has,” Mr Molyneux said.

“We are unfortunately going to see a large number of colleagues leave us and they all have experience and expertise.

“However we’re very confident that the team that will be here at JLR, which remember is at least 80% of the people that are here already, have the talent and the skill to be able to take this car company forward.

“It’s necessary that we get fit given what’s going on in the world around us.”

Mr Molyneux pointed to JLR’s five new battery electric vehicles (BEVs) which he said should drive up earnings, while easing back the levels of investment the company is making.

Three of those vehicles – the Range Rover Electric, Range Rover Sport Electric and Jaguar Type 01 – have already been released and deliveries are to begin in early 2027.

The Range Rover GT and new electric Defender are to launch next year.

Newly-published results show an improved financial performance for the company since last year’s cyber attack, but a significant cost hit from its restructuring efforts.

It reported revenues of £5.9 billion for the three months to the end of September.

This was a fifth higher than the same period last year.

The company also returned to a profit before tax and exceptional items of £6 million for the quarter, swinging from a loss of £134 million for the same period in 2025.

Last year’s financial results were heavily impacted by a cyber attack which forced JLR to halt production across its UK factories from September 1, for five weeks.

All of the group’s manufacturing sites, including factories in Solihull, West Midlands, and Halewood, Merseyside, stopped production, but restarted in October.

JLR said the improvement in the volume of sales and its profitability this year reflected the recovery from the incident.

But the company said it was expecting profit margins to be slightly lower for the full year “in light of ongoing market challenges, geopolitical risks and the exceptional costs recognised in the quarter”.

It flagged a cost hit of £530 million, including for restructuring and the write down of assets.