Will the Government finally take notice of car industry's plight?
The automotive industry’s pleas to the Government to take over the work of the banks – which seem to be on an indefinitely prolonged lending strike – have until now met with a response bordering on the catatonic.
The response to requests for interest-bearing loans, or loan guarantees, needed to maintain working capital flows in the face of one of the most savage recessions in the past 100 years, are taking so long to materialise there is a real risk that the industry could be all but dead by the time they arrive.
Everyone from the Prime Minister down has spoken words of sympathy and understanding while doing precious little to get desperately-needed credit flowing in to the car assemblers, their dealers and their components suppliers.
Now, however, the Government’s tardiness has provoked a reaction that would previously have been thought of as inconceivable.
The normally diplomatic and reticent Indian industrialist Ratan Tata has spoken, on the record to the Birmingham Post, of his bewilderment and frustration at the response to Jaguar Land Rover’s appeals for short-term aid. He went so far as to say that the Government simply has not grasped what is happening to the industry or what needs to be done to help it survive.
Those familiar with the Indian way of doing business say it is all but unheard of for someone of Mr Tata’s status to speak out in public in the way he has – least of all against the Government of a country in which he has invested heavily.
The Post understands, though, that Mr Tata has only said in public what other senior car company executives with interests in Britain are saying privately: that Whitehall’s response to the global recession, which, admittedly, has hit the car industry with the force and speed of a tsunami, has been slow and niggardly.
Some even wonder whether the Government even cares whether the country retains such an important manufacturing industry or not.
The hope this morning can only be that if ministers will not listen to their home-based critics, Mr Tata’s broadside will make them take notice.
When other governments seem to be responding to the crisis with the speed of a Jaguar XK, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and their ministerial sidekicks are pootling along like pensioners on a Sunday drive in a Morris Minor.
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