Gloom at Bathgate
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THE AXE of closure looks set to fall on Leyland Trucks' Bathgate plant, with an announcement expected as early as next month. This looked likely after 1,057 redundancies were declared last week at three other plants, writes ALAN MILLAR.
Leyland Vehicles chairman Ron Hancock told Labour MPs last week that a decision on Bathgate's future had not yet been taken, but its very exclusion from the other job cuts and the grim prospects for its future have left Government ministers resigned to the inevitable prospect of its closure with the loss of 1,800 jobs.
According to Leyland, an announcement will be made in "several weeks", but many believe that could be before the end of February.
As volume manufacture of British market vehicles will stop at the Scottish plant later this year, when the Terrier 7.5 to 10tonner is replaced by the Leyland-built MT211, its future rests with export business and engine manufacture.
Exports have been a near disaster in recent months for Leyland, notably to impoverished Nigeria where the traditional business for 2,500 vehicles per year has fallen to a few hundred.
Mr Hancock's plea to the Government to relax the ban on advance credit imposed by the Export Credit Guarantee Department has been rejected, and Junior Industry Minister John Butcher said this week that in terms of Britain's foreign aid programme, it would take eight per cent of the unspecified available funds to sustain the volume of orders and output from Bathgate. While Leyland was able to reassure Bathgate's workers last August that the plant's future was safe, it is now in deeper trouble as it now admits it is unable to fund the joint project with Cummins to manufacture its B-Series (formerly Family One) engine there.
That would have included a deal to supply key engine parts to Cummins for the manufacture of B-Series engines in the United States, as well as using a high proportion of Bathgate's output in place of the 98-Series diesel fitted in the Terrier and Freighter ranges.
While Cummins is not commenting on the implications of Leyland's problems until an announcement on Bathgate's future is made, it is no longer insisting that the deal is definitely still on.
All may not be lost for Cummins, however, as a similar plan announced in 1980 for the assembly of ZF 56.36 gearboxes at the Albion plant in Glasgow was abandoned subsequently when currency rates became unfavourable, and the gearboxes were imported complete for installation in lighter Freighter models.
Cummins' general policy is to manufacture engines wherever it best suits the demand for them, and it is conceivable that if Leyland were not to change its plans to buy, say, Perkins engines for the MT2 1 1 and Freighter, that B-Series units could either be imported from the USA or be manufactured at its British plants at either Shotts, near Bathgate, or Darlington.
Three Labour MPs met Mr Hancock on Monday to urge him to save Bathgate. Local MP Tam Dalyell told the Commons that there were no complaints about either the product or the Bath gate workforce.
"The difficulty lies in the market. It is not that the African countries do not want Bathgate vehicles, it is that they do not have the money to buy the vehicles which would help to stimulate their economies," he said.
The shadow hanging over Bathgate has deflected some of the attention from the other 1,057 redundancies, which are aimed at cutting potential output from 22,000 vehicles a year to between 11,000 and 12,000, very much in the middle league of manufacturing output and only a 10th of Mercedes-Benz output in 1982.
Of these, 522 come out of the 5,000 jobs at Leyland's main plant in Lancashire, another 387 are being cut from the 1,400 employed at the Albion axle plant, and 148 go from Scammell's special vehicle works at Watford.