Honda has just announced that it is investing over £200 million in a new Civic model and best of all it will be made at the car manufacturer’s plant in Swindon.
There are currently over 3,000 people employed at the factory, building the Civic, Jazz and CR-V for the UK and European markets, and it is expected to increase production to around 120,000 cars a year.
However, the news comes almost a year to the day that Honda announced that it would be closing parts of the production at Swindon at a cost of around 500 jobs. While it is great news that this latest announcement secures more jobs in the area I can only imagine, give the turbulent history, that workers are wondering how long the good news will last. It is all well and good giving people jobs but Honda need to commit to giving their workers long-term futures too.
So for the time being the news from Honda is positive. Let’s just hope that it continues.
Hopefully good news for the long term. A friend of mine was telling me the other day how many busy engineering and manufacturing firms there were when he was driving through Quarry Bank near Dudley. I suspect many of these are involved in the automotive supply chain, which is great. Funnily enough the same day I checked some sauce pans in Sainsburys which were made in the West Midlands. It was a very good news day kind of day, hoping for many more to come.