“I don’t have anything good to say about this place right now,” someone shouts, as workers flood out of the front gates of the Vauxhall van plant on Luton’s Kimpton Road.
It’s lunchtime on a crisp November day in the Bedfordshire town and the early shift has just finished at the plant, which can produce up to 100,000 vans each year.
Just 48 hours earlier these workers were being told by Stellantis, the plant’s owners, that 120 years of Vauxhall production in the town would come to an end and the plant would close in April.
Instead, the production of new electric vans earmarked for Luton will be transferred 180 miles away to Stellantis’s Ellesmere Port plant in Cheshire.
More than 1,100 Vauxhall jobs are now at risk, with unions estimating that this could rise above 2,000, including auxiliary staff.
“I was shocked – I wanted to work here for a long time,” says Haatib Afzal, who joined the company just a month ago.
The 25-year-old, who was born in Luton, has already started looking for a new job. “If you look there aren’t many opportunities for normal workers, like me,” he says.
Just ahead of Afzal is Alf Major, who has worked at the plant for 37 years and is about to retire. “It’s massive because this is one of the biggest employers in the town, and for the money, it is one of the best,” he says.
The production of Vauxhall cars is entwined with the history of Luton and its people. Tempted away from their original south London base, the owners of Vauxhall Motors set up on Kimpton Road in 1905.
Starting as a luxury car brand, it was bought by the US company General Motors in 1925 as a way into the UK market and began producing commercial vehicles.
In its heyday during the 1960s it employed 37,000 people but it has been on the decline ever since. This was accelerated in 2002 by General Motors’s decision to cease production of cars in the town, resulting in the immediate loss of 2,000 jobs.
In 2017 PSA, which would later become Stellantis, bought Vauxhall. However, since then there have been signs of a retreat from Luton.
“We did know there may be issues coming ahead but we thought it may be about [cutting] shifts,” says the Unite union rep Gary Reay, who has worked at the plant for 33 years. “We were never ever led to believe that this was about plant closure.”
On Tuesday, Stellantis, which also owns the Peugeot and Fiat brands, revealed proposals to stop producing vans by the end of the second quarter next year.
It claimed that this was owing to onerous targets being put on carmakers to produce electric vehicles under the government’s zero-emission vehicles (ZEV) mandate.
The mandate sets a target over the coming years that certain proportions of manufacturers outputs must be electric, with 22% of output needing to be electric next year (before various loopholes), with this increasing to 100% by 2035.
However, several carmakers have criticised the current plan, saying that weak demand for electric vehicles set against high production costs was harming the industry. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has claimed that the mandate could cost the sector £6bn this year in discounts and payments for “credits” to hit the targets.
Hours after the announcement and under growing pressure from producers, the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said he would be looking at changes to rules that impose fines of up to £15,000 for each petrol or diesel vehicle sold above a quota.
Rachel Hopkins, the MP for Luton South and South Bedfordshire, welcomes this and says it is right to look at how the mandate is working but believes the deadline of 2035 should be kept.
However, she is sceptical that the mandate was the sole reason for the decision, pointing to the fact that the company had committed to producing medium-sized electric vans at the plant only in February.
The Guardian reported that, just two months ago, Stellantis had told investors it was confident of meeting ZEV mandate rules.
Andy Palmer, the former chief operating officer of Nissan and former chief executive of Aston Martin, believes that blaming the closure on the ZEV mandate was “disingenuous” and a “good lobbying point”.
The Luton plant “has been hanging by a thread for 25 years at least” as ownership changed hands, says Palmer, who used to assign work to the plant under a deal for General Motors to make vans for Nissan.
The factory’s owners “could never get enough volume all by itself,” says Palmer.
Workers say shock at the decision has been further enhanced by the fact that significant investment and work to prepare the plant for producing electric vehicles was still taking place.
“I‘ve been working on the [new van] project. A lot of installation went in there over the summer, there’s a lot of stuff planned to go in over the Christmas period,” says Vanessa Page, a health and safety adviser at the plant. “It was looking positive, they were investing money.”
Reay adds that even up until two weeks ago, he was told that the production forecasts he was shown for next year included 10,000 electric vehicles.
While Stellantis has offered staff the option of transferring to Ellesmere Port to take up some of the 600 new jobs it has promised there, workers believe that few will go.
It also said it would offer comprehensive job support, including retraining, for affected employees and work with local employers to identify new employment opportunities within the Luton area.
You only have to walk down George Street, Luton’s high street, to understand how interwoven Vauxhall is into the family stories of long-term residents, or Lutonians.
“My grandad came from here in the 1960s from Kashmir,” says Tanver Munir, speaking outside the building’s town hall. “My uncle’s worked, I’ve even got cousins that worked there up until a few years ago. That’s three generations.”
“It’s not 1,000 people is it? It’s 1,000 families, and it is uncertain what will happen to them. There are no immediate employment opportunities around here.”
In October, the ball-bearing manufacturer SKF shut its Luton factory after 100 years, resulting in 300 job losses, adding to the tightening job market in the town.
Justin Richardson, the chief executive of the Bedfordshire Chamber of Commerce, says that while the Vauxhall closure was a huge blow for the town, there were other opportunities opening up.
This includes next-door Luton airport, which employs about 12,000 people in the region and is plotting a £2.4bn expansion.
“When the car plant closed they said that would be the death of Luton but its a resilient place,” he says. “There is still a huge amount of opportunity and growth prospects.”
The union, council and local MP have said that they will now try to fight the closure but if they are unsuccessful, the future could be bleak for the 2,000 workers.
“I’m 53 years of age – I’m not going to retire,” says Richard Hay, a forklift driver at the plant. “I’m an unskilled employee, as such. I have driven a forklift for 20 years. I’m worried about paying the mortgage, and what happens now. It’s the unknown.”
