Tata asks UK for £500m for battery factory

NICHOLAS EARL group from its natural gas dependency following a bailout last year.

THE GOVERNMENT will have to cough up £500m in taxpayer funds if it wants Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) owner Tata Motors to build a new battery factory in Britain.

The Indian car giant is close to choosing between Spain and the UK for its new plant and has given ministers just weeks to make a decision, according to the Financial Times.

Tata’s demands reflect the challenge the government faces over how much support to give the industry, as the UK scrambles to transition from petrol and diesel cars to mass-market electric vehicles.

The company made some of the heaviest losses in the history of business amid a spike in wholesale costs.

EON confirmed the news and revealed it is now in talks with Uniper over when Lewis will take on his new role and has started the selection process for a successor.

JLR is the largest employer in the UK car manufacturing sector and it would be a huge blow for the UK’s battery ambitions if it opted against sourcing batteries in the country.

The industry is still recovering from the resale of Britishvolt to Aussie group Recharge, which has now decided to use the plant to develop clean energy storage and batteries for luxury, high-end sports cars rather than lithium batteries for the mainstream UK car industry.

EVEN as Charlotte Crosswell launched the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) in Leeds this week with a mandate to boost fintech across the UK, those in attendance were asking why it couldn’t have been in London.

The Leeds event had big name backers in City minister Andrew Griffith and has full-throated support from across government and the industry. But however whimsical those questions may have been, they now point to the challenge ahead for CFIT and its chair, the former open banking and Innovate Finance chief Crosswell.

CFIT was outlined as the key delivery measure in the landmark Kalifa review of fintech in 2021, and was described by Ron Kalifa as “the outstanding piece of the jigsaw” to deliver a coherent national strategy for the sector when it was given £5.5m seed funding by the Treasury in 2021.

But fintech’s success has become synonymous with the capital. And, naturally, the talent and money that keeps the sector moving have followed. The role of Crosswell and CFIT’s new chief exec Ezechi Britton is now to ensure the spread of the sector becomes “more balanced”.

“If we do our role well, by having the spotlight and the input and output coming in from those regions, [talent and investment] will be a natural evolution,” she tells City A.M. in an interview. “We’re not there to promote [areas outside of London], that’s not our role. We’re there to solve the difficult challenges.”

She says the aim of the new body will not be to draw the existing sector away from the capital but to establish cities like Manchester, Belfast and Bristol as thriving fintech ecosystems in their own right. As you would expect with a challenge of that size, it is likely to be easier said than done.

London Calling

Fintech has undoubtedly been a UK success story of the past ten years.

Regulators and politicians moved fast in the wake of the financial crisis and rolled out smart reforms that have spawned an ecosystem and been adopted the world over. But it is an industry that has clustered tightly around London. If London was a country, it would have