Ford to cut 4,000 jobs in Europe, with Germany and the UK hardest hit – as it happened

Our two main stories today:

Ford has said that it will cut 4,000 jobs in Europe, becoming the latest carmaker to seek to reduce costs amid slowing growth in electric car sales and competition from China.

The American carmaker said on Wednesday it would cut 800 jobs in the UK and 2,900 in Germany. The company’s UK sites in Dagenham and Halewood will not be affected.

The cuts represent about 14% of its 28,000 workforce in Europe and will be completed by the end of 2027.

Ford is the latest in a series of global carmakers to aim for cost savings as the industry struggles with waning demand while also trying to invest in the transition to electric cars.

Inflation increased to 2.3% in October, heaping pressure on the Bank of England to delay further interest rate cuts until next year.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Wednesday showed that a rise in energy bills pushed up the consumer prices index (CPI), reversing a downward trend this year in inflation, which was 1.7% in September.

The figure for the year to October was slightly above the 2.2% City economists had expected.

The ONS said higher gas and electricity prices were offset by lower oil prices, which reduced the transport and raw materials costs of manufacturing businesses. Falls in the price of theatre and live music tickets also helped to limit the fastest month-on-month increase in prices since October 2022, at 0.6%.

Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. Take care! – JK

Shares in UK housebuilders have fallen today, after UK inflation jumped more than expected, suggesting that the Bank of England will move cautiously in reducing borrowing costs.

Inflation accelerated to 2.3% last month from 1.7% in September – taking it back above the Bank’s target. Inflation in the services sector, which the central bank regards as a key measure of domestic price pressures, rose to 5% from 4.9%.

The UK housebuilders’ index fell by 3.4% with Vistry Group (formerly Bovis Homes) the biggest loser, with shares down 8.1%. Other FTSE 100 builders Berkeley Group, Persimmon, Barratt Redrow and Taylor Wimpey dropped by between 2.5% and 3%.

Ford has announced it will cut 4,000 jobs in Europe, mainly in Germany and the UK.

This amounts to 14% of the American carmaker’s European workforce. The layoffs will be made by the end of 2027. Globally, they represent around 2.3% of Ford’s workforce of 174,000.

The company blamed significant losses in recent years caused by weak demand for electric vehicles, a lack of government support for the shift to EVs, and growing competition.

Ford is the latest carmaker after Nissan, Stellantis and General Motors to cut costs as the industry struggles with growing competition from Chinese rivals in Europe, waning demand in China, and the challenges of selling electric cars that are still too expensive for many people to buy.

The European Union has imposed tariffs on Chinese-made EVs, which it says benefit from unfair subsidies from the Beijing government.

Ford’s move deals a big blow to Germany, Europe’s largest economy. Volkswagen is threatening to close factories, slash wages and cut thousands of jobs to improve its ability to compete. The country is also in political crisis, with a snap election in February, while companies grapple with growing trade tensions with China and the threat of US tariffs following Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

Ford said Europe’s automakers

face significant competitive and economic headwinds while also tackling a misalignment between CO2 regulations and consumer demand for electrified vehicles.

Ford’s sales in Europe plunged by 17.9% in September, far outstripping an industrywide decline of 6.1%.

Ford called on the German government to provide more incentives and better charging infrastructure to help consumers transition to EVs. Berlin ended EV subsidies in December last year, and sales of electric cars in Germany were down by 28.6% in the first nine months of this year.

Ford‘s chief financial officer John Lawler wrote in a letter to the German government:

What we lack in Europe and Germany is an unmistakable, clear policy agenda to advance e-mobility, such as public investments in charging infrastructure, meaningful incentives … and greater flexibility in meeting CO2 compliance targets.

Ford already announced 3,800 job cuts in Europe in February 2023.

The company behind Tokyo’s renowned metro system has won a deal to take over the operation of London’s Elizabeth line, replacing the incumbent Chinese-owned operator MTR.

Tokyo Metro Company (TMC) has promised to bring Japanese reliability and punctuality to London’s newest rail line after its consortium with the UK transport group Go-Ahead and the Japanese trading house Sumitomo Corporation beat three other bidders for the deal.

The GTS Rail Operations consortium will now take over the running of the line, which opened in 2022, for at least seven years from next May.

MTR, which is three-quarters owned by the Hong Kong government and operates the transport network in the administrative region of China, won the deal to manage services on the Elizabeth line in 2014 when Boris Johnson was mayor.

Sharon White joins Canadian pension fund

Mark Sweney

Dame Sharon White, the former chair of John Lewis, has been appointed as the European head of the Canadian public pension fund manager that holds investments in companies including Eurostar and Heathrow airport.

White, who stepped down as John Lewis chair in September, has been given the official title of managing director and head of Europe at Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and will start in January.

White, the shortest-serving chair in the history of the John Lewis Partnership, had been due to leave the retailer next February but stepped aside early to make way for former Tesco boss Jason Tarry.

The announcement of White’s decision to step down came a month after she announced that the group’s turnaround would take two years longer than planned and cost more money.

John Lewis ditched its annual staff bonus for the second time in three years in March last year, after the group slumped to a worse-than-expected £230m full-year loss.

Her tenure had been mired in controversy including a reported plan to dilute its employee-owned mutual model by selling a stake in the business to raise more than £1bn, which was shelved after she narrowly won a vote of confidence in which staff backed her to continue but expressed dismay at the retailer’s poor performance.

Lidl’s UK business has bounced back into profit after it slowed expansion in favour of improving existing stores, spurring a jump in sales to above £9bn.

The German-owned discounter, which is close to overtaking Morrisons to become the UK’s fifth-largest supermarket, said it had gained more than 300,000 new shoppers and 60% of Britons visited the chain at least once year.

Profits rebounded in the year to February as the group cut back investment, opening just one net new store, according to the accounts, compared with 45 in the previous year.

The company began slowing down the rate of new stores last year, after several years of frequent store openings. However, it plans to open 40 new outlets next year and 18 in the coming months.

The energy regulator has ordered power supplier E.ON Next to pay £14.5m in compensation to nearly 250,000 prepayment customers, after an investigation found “unacceptable” failures to pay credit they had on accounts or final bill payments they were owed.

Ofgem found that the customers were affected over an 18-month period from early 2021 to late last year by an error in E.ON Next’s billing system. About 100,000 of the affected accounts were also in credit.

Prepayment customers who transferred to another supplier or terminated their contract did not receive final bills within the required six-week period, and the gas and electricity supplier subsequently failed to make the required compensation payments of £30 or £60.

Because customers did not receive a final bill they were also unaware of any credit remaining on their accounts, worth an average of £51 per affected customer.

One of the UK’s biggest pension funds has lost more than £350m on a series of “calamitous” investments in incinerator power plants that are expected to go bust in the coming days.

The Guardian understands that Aviva Investors will put three incinerators into administration this week after pouring millions of pounds into what has been described as the country’s “dirtiest form of power generation”.

Aviva’s own accounts show that the three incinerator plants – in Hull in East Yorkshire, Boston in Lincolnshire and Barry in south Wales – accumulated loans totalling £480m from its investors between 2015 and 2023.

Aviva has written off £368m for the plants, which were originally intended to run on biomass waste wood and later converted to burn household waste, but which struggled to reach their targets.

HSBC is to launch its first UK “wealth centre” in London’s Mayfair district, offering more personalised banking services and exclusive events such as wine tastings as part of a drive to win more rich customers.

The lender will take up two floors of the 16-storey Smithson Tower at 25 St James’s Street – close to the Ritz Hotel and Fortnum & Mason department store – as part of a revamp of HSBC’s premier-tier bank service. Aimed at the sought-after “mass affluent” market, premier is a tier below private-banking clients and is targeted at customers with £100,000 to £2m in income, assets or deposits.

The 8,000 sq ft wealth centre, which is due to open by summer 2025, will give premier clients access to a concierge team, catering services and a barista coffee bar, alongside 12 high-spec meeting rooms with panoramic views of London to meet HSBC team of dedicated relationship bankers.

Santander UK has put aside £295m to cover potential payouts to car loan customers as the bank issued its first estimate of the financial fallout from the growing car loan mis-selling scandal.

The figures were released alongside the bank’s third-quarter results, which were delayed last month after a court of appeal ruling in October said it was unlawful for two lenders to have paid a “secret” commission to car dealers without borrowers’ knowledge.

The provision dented the bank’s pre-tax profits, which fell to £143m in the quarter, down from £413m in the second quarter.

Car lenders such as Santander UK had already been facing potential payouts over an Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) investigation into a specific type of commission payment, discretionary commission arrangements, that was banned in 2021.

Policymakers have been “left in the dark” by official jobs figures since the pandemic, which may have “lost” almost a million workers according to the thinktank Resolution Foundation.

In a report, the thinktank said the regular snapshot from the Office for National Statistics may have painted an “overly pessimistic” picture of the UK labour market since the pandemic.

The thinktank’s principal economist, Adam Corlett, says in the report that response rates to the key Labour Force Survey (LFS) have collapsed, from 39% in 2019 to just 13% last year.

There are concerns that workers may be less likely to respond to the survey than people who are economically inactive, potentially skewing the results.