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People might not like me saying this, but if you put the emotions, traditions and local pride to one side, the part closure of Jaguar's Brown's Lane plant makes a lot of sense. The Big Cat is married to a corporation called Ford. The couple have three marital homes - Brown's Lane, Coventry, Castle Bromwich in Birmingham and Halewood, Merseyside. Make that four if the engineering and design centre in Whitley, Coventry, is counted. No marriage needs that many separate bases, so some of the Brown's Lane Estate is being sold off, making the pairing more financially solvent.

Auto Express Car Reviews

By Mike Rutherford

28th September 2004

That seems like perfect sense to me, particularly when you realise a big chunk of the operation - the head offices, Heritage Trust and wood veneer facility - will remain at the famous venue which continues to exist as a Jaguar plant, merely on a smaller scale. It's just that all car production will now be at Castle Bromwich and Halewood.

True, there will be redundancies, but the Jaguar top brass insists that with positions on offer at sister company Aston Martin, the overall loss might be 100 production jobs, rather than the thousands sensationally reported originally. I also understand that those workers who want to retire early will get very favourable severance deals.

Nobody, least of all me, is underestimating the impact redundancies can have. But car workers - as with the rest us - have to accept that lower-than-expected sales, market penetration and profits (or in Jag's case, losses) inevitably mean cutbacks.

Jaguar is engaged in a global battle with Mercedes and BMW. Both built plants in the American south, and Audi has done the same in Hungary. Yet we get all hot under the collar because Jaguar will only have two proper factories in England. If and when Jaguar production moves abroad, we can begin to worry a bit. But when car building is simply being shifted from one part of England to another, start believing - as I do - that this is better in the long run for the viability of the company and its workforce.

Do you really think a forward-thinking man like Jaguar founder William Lyons would, if he was alive today, let sentimentality get the better of him? Or would he say Halewood and Castle Bromwich are more appropriate sites, and that part of Brown's Lane has had its day? It's my guess he'd go for the second option.

Car companies are not unlike other operations I could mention. Did Arsenal become a lesser team when it moved from Woolwich to Highbury, and will it become worse when it moves to its new stadium? I think not. The Daily Telegraph didn't deteriorate just because it left its historic home in Fleet Street for Wapping. And Auto Express has got better, not worse, since it moved from offices in south London to its current headquarters in the capital's West End. Even if there are some painful job losses at Jag, com-panies competing in an international business environment have to move onwards, upwards and occasionally out. That's merely what Jaguar is doing, while still managing to retain part of its spiritual home at Brown's Lane. What's the problem?