Vauxhall revisited

Closure led to 3,000 job losses

When it comes to regenerating an economy hit by thousands of job losses it seems that, like selling a house, location is the key.

The town of Luton has produced an astonishing achievement in absorbing almost three thousand people whose jobs disappeared when Vauxhall ended car production there.

It's only two years since the closure of the plant was announced, and nine months since the last car rolled off the production line.

But the various local councils and government agencies involved in finding them work reckon around 2,500 of them have already been re-employed.

Re-employed

They were lucky that General Motors, Vauxhall's owner, kept a thousand workers to transfer to its IBC van-making company on the site.

But a further one thousand have been through re-training, found new skills and found new jobs.

What's more not everyone has been made redundant yet, as the factory slowly winds down and some people are still working their way through the training schemes.

The regeneration agencies are confident they can find work for almost everyone.

Lower pay

They warn that many of them will have to accept lower pay than they used to earn at the car maker, but the closure clearly hasn't been the hammer blow to the local economy that many feared.

Compared with the decades it has taken to recover in other areas of the UK hit by the closure of factories, shipyards or coalmines, it's a remarkable achievement.

Expansion plans at Luton Airport could mean jobs

That, of course, is where location comes in.

Luton's position in the south east, close to the M1 and M25, means there's no shortage of companies wanting to move in.

The airport is planning to expand, the local hospital is growing fast and a new business park is quickly filling up.

In the two years since Working Lunch last visited the town, new buildings offering more jobs have sprung up.

New skills

Luton hasn't got off completely though. There have been many redundancies in manufacturing and unemployment at four per cent is relatively high for the region.

As so often when it comes to regeneration, the main task has been to give new skills to a workforce used to manufacturing.

Here Luton was quick off the mark, the East of England Development Agency put together a one and a half million pounds package to retrain Vauxhall workers.

A thousand of them have taken up the offer to learn skills in plumbing, building and computing.

New jobs

The company too helped out. Allowing its staff to go for interviews, attend training and even try out new jobs as they served their redundancy.

Mick: now paid less but has a Vauxhall's pension

That was a boon to two former car-workers we met. Gareth Davies and Mick Walker, have both found work as porters at the Luton and Dunstable Hospital.

Gareth moved from South Wales to Luton to find work at the car factory in the 1980s. After 17 years in the company he feared he'd never get another job.

"I love it here," said Gareth. "It's a people job. The staff I work with are great, really friendly.

"I miss some of my colleagues at the factory, but I don't miss the work at all. I'd rather be dealing with people than lumps of metal."

Mick Walker has 32 years at the car plant behind him, but he's not looking back.

Gareth: "I love it here"

"It's a great atmosphere here. I thought it was going to be difficult to settle into another job after so long at Vauxhall. But it's been easy.

"Mind you, the pay is low. It's ok for people like me, I've got my Vauxhall pension to subsidise me, but for young people with families it must be very difficult to do a job like this."

Working together

Like hundreds of their colleagues, Gareth and Mick had little problem in finding new jobs.

The way local government and council departments got together with Vauxhall shows how to cope with an economic crisis like this.

But the fact that there was a pool of employers keen to take on the redundant workers also shows just how important it is to be in the right part of the country too.