HONDA PREPARES TO CLOSE SWINDON FACTORY, BUT WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE SITE?

More than 35 years after it first established a presence in the UK, the Japanese carmaker Honda will close its Swindon factory later this year.

The motor manufacturer, which built around 150,000 cars a year at the plant and currently builds the Civic, announced its intention to close in early 2019. It said the decision was part of a major restructuring, not related to Brexit and based on unprecedented changes in the global market. At the same time, it announced the closure of its factory in Kocaeli, Turkey, which will also happen this year.

However, the news was devastating for Swindon and Honda’s workforce –which now number around 2,500, but was much more when the manufacturer was at full capacity.

The government and local council quickly established a taskforce to help mitigate the problems associated with the closure of such a major employer. The manufacturer’s substantial supply chain is also feeling the chill and are being supported by the taskforce.

Two years on and the town has benefited thanks to a range of investments. These include £25 million from the government’s Future High Streets Fund to regenerate Fleming Way into a new Bus Boulevard, to funding for a new Institute of Technology, near North Star, on which work will begin soon.

Swindon has come back from hard economic knocks before, most notably after the town’s famous engine works, opened by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1843, were closed 100 years later.

But what to do with the 370 acre site in North Swindon which Honda bought in 1985?

The council isn’t going to let the site go without a fight. In January, Swindon Borough Council leader David Renard made local headlines after he said he’d written to Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla, drawing his attention to the Honda site and its skilled workforce, and suggesting that he should consider it for the development of a gigafactory.

David admits that the site, while large, probably won’t be big enough to build such a factory (Tesla’s Nevada Desert gigafactory is built on a 3,200-acre site), but he is determined to see the site retained for employment use

He said: “Ideally we would like to see more high value manufacturing industry to replace Honda, but I think given the size we will probably end up with a mix of manufacturing, logistics and office space.”

The difficulty for the town is that Honda hasn’t yet said what it plans to do with the site. Everyone interviewed for this article said that the Japanese car manufacturer is playing its cards close to its chest.

The council is doing as much as it can to ensure that whatever happens to the site, it will be ready to respond.

David added: “It is one of the most important employment development sites in the UK, and whatever happens to it, it must be for Swindon’s long-term interests, but the town had a broadbased economy, and we will come back from this.”

He’s right. Despite the Honda closure, the Demos-PwC Good Growth for Cities 2020, published in January, ranks Swindon 11th out of 42 towns and cities in the South West, saying Swindon, like Reading, has been less impacted than others by the pandemic.

Previously an airfield, Honda bought the Swindon site in 1985 and established Honda of the UK Manufacturing. By 1989 the manufacturer had opened an engine plant. In 1992, Car Plant One became fully operational. Since then, Honda has gone on to produce the Accord, Jazz, CR-V and Civic at the site.