Tata Group Gigafactory Investment

I am pleased to update the House about the significant investment announced by Tata Group just yesterday. The confirmation that Tata will be investing over £4 billion to build a new gigafactory—the largest in Europe, I believe—in the UK is a historic moment and a major vote of confidence in our automotive sector.

Across Government, we have worked closely with Tata for the past two years to help secure this crucial investment for the UK, and its decision to invest here is a testament to our strong partnership with Tata. Tata’s announcement represents one of the largest investments we have ever seen in the automotive sector, and is part of a new wave of investments—as significant as those made in the 1980s—that are helping to turbocharge our transition to zero-emission vehicles. It will also be the group’s first gigafactory outside India, directly creating up to 4,000 highly skilled new jobs, alongside thousands of further jobs in the wider supply chain for battery materials and critical raw materials.

Tata says that the battery gigafactory will produce high-quality, high-performance, sustainable battery cells and packs for a variety of applications within the mobility and energy sectors. As the anchor customer, the new gigafactory will supply Jaguar Land Rover’s future battery electric models, including in the Range Rover, Defender, Discovery and Jaguar brands. That means we will soon see cars from JLR’s iconic British brands manufactured in the UK, powered by batteries produced in the UK and developed using technology from research and development centres in the UK, before being exported to markets all over the world. Battery production at the new facility will commence in 2026, and we look forward to confirmation of the site’s location once due diligence has been finalised. When operational, Tata expects it to be one of the largest buildings in the UK and plans to maximise its renewable energy mix, with an ambition for 100% clean power.

The investment is also an important reflection of the UK’s position as a key location for European and global automotive manufacturing. With an initial output of 40 GW, the new factory confirmed yesterday will be one of the largest in Europe. As well as being a significant moment for the UK, this investment will play an important part in strengthening economic resilience across Europe in the highly integrated supply chain for the automotive sector and other key sectors. Using the Faraday Institution’s estimates, it will provide almost half of the UK’s required battery production by 2030, boosting the battery manufacturing capacity we need to support the electric vehicle industry in the long term.

The Government are committed to supporting the automotive sector and the electric vehicle supply chain to take full advantage of the move to zero-emission vehicles, and we are putting this commitment into action through the automotive transformation fund, the British industry supercharger and our strong programme of support for research and development. We are working alongside industry to unlock further private investment in our EV supply chain, and we have long-standing and comprehensive programmes of support for the automotive sector, including the ATF, the Advanced Propulsion Centre and, of course, the Faraday battery challenge.

This investment is an important milestone in enabling a UK-made transition to net zero. However, it does not stand in isolation. It builds on other announcements that have been secured with the support of Government, including Nissan and Envision plans to secure £1 billion to create an EV manufacturing hub in Sunderland, Ford committing a total of £380 million to make Halewood the first EV components site in Europe and Stellantis investing £100 million to transition Ellesmere Port to electric van manufacturing.

The transition to zero-emission vehicles gives us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape the future of manufacturing. Over 166,000 people are directly employed in the automotive sector, and I am delighted that yesterday’s announcement means that thousands of new highly-skilled jobs will be created in the next few years just for this project alone. This fantastic news from Tata shows that the Government are getting behind business to unlock the barriers to growth and secure further investment, and it will be a real boost to the entire sector. I look forward to building on the momentum and continuing our strong relationship with the sector, so that we can move the UK forward in the race to net zero and support the delivery of the Prime Minister’s priority to grow the economy. I commend this statement to the House.

I thank the Minister for advance sight of the statement.

Anyone who cares about and has knowledge of the automotive sector knows how important these battery factories are to the future of the UK. Without batteries being made here, it is unlikely there will be a long-term future for automotive production in this country, and for too long the UK has been far behind where we need to be. Therefore, everyone should welcome this news and breathe a huge sigh of relief that we finally have a positive development. In all the urgent questions, debates and statements we have had, this is what we have been calling for.

However, this relief should also come with the humility to appreciate that there is still a great deal to do. If this factory proceeds as planned, the UK will have 66 GWh of capacity by 2030, but at that point Germany would have over 300 GWh, Hungary over 200 GWh and China over 6,000 GWh. I therefore hope there is resolve in Government to make sure that this is just one of several major announcements of this kind. Of course, to secure this investment a substantial amount of public money has had to be spent. The Minister did not actually reference that. Can she provide some clarity on the media reports we have seen about how much exactly that will amount to?

This approach of using public investment to leverage in a much greater degree of private investment is the approach that we have advocated in Labour’s green prosperity plan. Government Ministers have at times publicly disagreed with this proposal, but we always knew they were in talks that involved the same approach. I therefore put it to the Minister that it would be far better to set out that Government approach openly, transparently and honestly in order to attract more potential partners and be able to negotiate from a stronger position. Some might call this an industrial strategy, because the truth is that the UK was desperate for this announcement. If it had gone to another country, such as Spain, things would have looked very bleak indeed. That is why we are all so relieved, but that is not, if we are frank, the optimum negotiating position to find ourselves in.

I warmly welcome the Government’s decision and the announcement by Tata, which highlights the UK’s tech potential—

Order. I beg the right hon. Gentleman’s forgiveness. I was being distracted by another right hon. Gentleman, who ought to know better, and I therefore did not call the Minister to answer. I do apologise.

I think maybe we got a bit noisy as we were trying to fully digest the slightly delusional response of the Opposition Front Bencher, the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds), to this statement. Our job as representatives of the automotive sector is to praise, protect and promote, not to play politics, especially with investment this substantial.

Tata’s investment is so substantial. It is 40% of the gigawatts that we need, and fundamentally we need to have 100% by 2030. With Tata and Envision, we are two thirds of the way there. Obviously we want more, but we are not going to be complacent. We should not compare ourselves with the rest of Europe when their needs will be substantially different from ours, but let us take a moment to reflect on what is happening internationally. This is a global race to achieve net zero. Tata has decided to come here to the UK because it has faith in UK workers, UK technology and UK innovation. It has confidence in the UK supply chain, but fundamentally it has confidence in the UK Government’s policy when it comes to advanced manufacturing and the automotive sector.

The hon. Gentleman spoke about the automotive transformation fund, which is a £1 billion fund to support exactly this sort of initiative, but let us just reflect on the bonanza—I am not sure that is the right term—that the Opposition are offering. It is £28 billion in their plan, which is a lot of money for the taxpayer to front up for an un-costed plan that, as far as I am aware, is not endorsed by anyone in the advanced manufacturing sector and what they want to achieve. As we are getting close to our summer holiday, the £28 billion of un-costed promises that the Opposition are making are a bit like lines in the sand. We can look down at them, but the tide of reality will come in.

The Opposition’s proposals mean nothing to industry or to job creation. They are created within the Westminster bubble. [Interruption.] If the Opposition do not believe me, they should listen to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the umbrella organisation for the automotive sector. It has talked about the substance in the UK supply chain, which will be a part of this initiative going forward. Unlike anywhere else in Europe, we have a fantastic supply chain with graphene, silicon carbide wafers—I am learning so much—power electronics, batteries and powertrains. It is a substantial boost to our supply chains in the UK. As the hon. Gentleman knows, I am working not only on our critical minerals strategy but on our supply strategy, to make sure we are using UK innovation and UK goods across all our supply chains, and in particular in the automotive sector. I urge him to have some humility and to reverse, and to praise, promote and protect the sector, and definitely not to play politics with it; that is a very weak thing to do.

And now I call Dominic Raab.

I warmly welcome the Government’s announcement and Tata’s decision, which highlights the tech potential of the UK. Does the Minister agree that our longer-term strategy, as I think she was setting out, is that we will not be able to engage in a bidding war on subsidies with the US, China and the EU, and that our comparative advantage will be shoring up the supply chain in the context of EV batteries, which means lithium deposits in the south-west and our emerging refinement capacity in Teesside?

I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement and agree with every single point he made. He mentioned the lithium mine in Cornwall, which will eventually produce enough lithium for 500,000 electric cars and vehicles. There is such success for our supply chain because this Government have a strategy that is embedded in the real-world politics of dealing with the automotive sector, and our critical minerals refresh was exactly the support required for the lithium mine in Cornwall.

It is not just about the financial support; it is also about the ecosystem. Fundamentally, the organisation had faith in initiatives such as the Faraday battery challenge, the Advanced Propulsion Centre and the tech in the UK. All the components that are required are here in the UK, and we have been able to link that ecosystem and supply chain together, which gave Tata the confidence to come and build the biggest gigafactory in Europe here in the UK.

I thank the Minister for her statement and early sight of it. I agree that battery manufacturing capacity is important as part of our move towards EVs, away from petrol and diesel vehicles, and towards all our targets to achieve net zero. It would be remiss of me not to mention that a few years ago, as I am sure the Minister recalls, Dundee was given the “most EV visionary city in Europe” award by the World Electric Vehicle Association in Japan.

Let me turn to the statement itself. A £4 billion or so investment by Tata—that’s good. Substantial investment by Envision in battery production in Sunderland, plus the other investments the Minister mentioned, are of course all welcome. Yet that is broadly a comparable sum—around £6 billion—to the investment in the EV charging network we have been promised by 2030. Does the Minister think we are on track to have the right balance between investment in the supply chain and battery production capacity, and in the EV charging network. That network is where most drivers intersect with the system and it is the largest cause of frustration when it does not work or breaks down.

I do not think it gets any more positive from the SNP on this point. I am pleased that the right hon. Gentleman welcomed the £4 billion investment and the more than 4,000 jobs, and the confidence we have in the advanced manufacturing sector in the UK; that was such a positive response to what this Government have been able to achieve. I was not aware of the Dundee point, but I will go away and look it up. So many people have been responsible for getting this project over the line and so many have been campaigning for gigafactories. In particular, my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset (Mr Liddell-Grainger) has been campaigning for gigafactories for longer than I have been in Parliament, so huge thanks go to him and to everyone else who helped to get this project over the line.

On charging points, as the Minister of State, Department for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) said in last week’s debate on the automotive sector, ChargeUK has committed to investing more than £6 billion in the development and operation of charging infrastructure before 2030. We heard in that debate that some colleagues felt the investment in their constituencies was not substantial enough. We need to make sure that as demand for EV vehicles grows—there has been much more demand and many more sales recently—the charging infrastructure stands up to that. As the Minister responsible for the automotive sector, I know we are doing everything we can to fulfil our part of the bargain, as it were, but we need to make sure that charging infrastructure is rolled out as fast as it can be. Substantial targets are being met and the Transport Minister is keen to take up constituency cases to make sure that the roll-out is fast as it can be.

I am absolutely delighted by this announcement. A number of my constituents work in the Vauxhall van factory in Luton, which makes a fantastic Vivaro van that we want to get electrified. Will the Minister say a little more about how we complete the final piece of the picture so that every car plant in the UK is reassured that there will be UK-made batteries? Yesterday’s announcement was fantastic, but one or two of us are concerned about that last piece.

I hope to get an invitation to visit that plant and my hon. Friend’s constituency, and I will of course do my best to promote Vauxhall vans. What is really exciting about this initiative is that it is about producing batteries not just for JLR but for the whole market, which is crucial. With the Tata and Envision gigafactories, we are two thirds of the way to getting to the 100 GW that the Faraday challenge believes we need. We are not complacent and are still going to do everything we can to secure further investment and seek further growth in this area, but for the moment we need to accept that this gigafactory could have gone anywhere in Europe, and there were huge talks about where it was going to be, but Tata had confidence in the UK and decided to come home to us.

May I say, Madam Deputy Speaker, what a pleasure it is to see you back in the Chair on a regular basis? I wish you and everybody else who works in Parliament a very good recess when it comes.

This is a very welcome announcement. Tata is a good company and this is a big day and a big announcement. Of course, this investment should have been in Huddersfield —I would say that, wouldn’t I?—because we have a wonderful engineering skillset. I do not want to be a downer, but I warn the Minister of this: by the time building work on the canal system was finished, everybody had lost their shirt on their investment because the railways came unexpectedly and all the investment was wiped out. I have recently visited JCB, which has developed hydrogen-powered vehicles; will the Minister make sure that the Government focus equally on hydrogen? Many of us believe that, rather like the railways and the canals, hydrogen will come almost out of the blue and be the major, much more sustainable, future mode of transport.

The hon. Member is absolutely right that Huddersfield is a great place. We are not complacent: if the right opportunity, investment and partnership is put forward, we will of course consider that. We want to make sure that we continue to grow our gigafactory capacity. I knew that the hon. Member was going to touch on hydrogen, which he talks about often. The work we are doing with the ATF is not just about electric vehicles but about how we adopt all new functioning technologies to get to the first stage of zero emissions, and then to the next stage and so on. There are opportunities for hydrogen projects to come forward. Just a few weeks ago I visited a major construction project where not only the vehicles on site building and developing the port and the infrastructure were going to be hydrogen, but the vehicles moving on and off the site were to be well. Hydrogen is very much in our sights too.

I warmly welcome this announcement. Does my hon. Friend agree that it shows this Government’s commitment to real and tangible green investment in the crucial automotive industry, in its supply chains and in many connected businesses throughout the UK, including the environmentally exemplary, forward-thinking transport logistics company in my constituency, Brit European?

Brit European sounds like one of the firms I need to meet. No doubt my hon. Friend will invite me to visit, and I look forward to meeting the firm with her. She is absolutely right: this is a huge vote of confidence in our ability to adopt new technologies to achieve net zero. It is not just about finding and securing new sources of critical minerals; we are at the leading edge of battery recycling too. The UK Battery Industrialisation Centre will help us to stay at the forefront of recycling.

My constituents are desperate to embrace the transition to electric vehicles, whether cars, vans or buses, but electric cars remain far too expensive, and the charging infrastructure barely exists—and where it does exist, it is not reliable. Although investment is welcome, we need a consistent strategy. If the Government are serious about reaching net zero, I urge the Minister to look again at reintroducing incentives to take up electric vehicles. Will she consider giving local authorities a statutory responsibility to roll out, with pandemic-style urgency, the EV charging infra- structure that we so desperately need?