LONDON – Britain, has moved to protect one of its most iconic manufacturers, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), with a £1.5 billion loan guarantee, after a crippling cyberattack forced the company to halt production for nearly a month and pushed its supply chain to the brink of collapse.
The government intervention, announced on Monday, underscores both the economic and social stakes of safeguarding JLR, whose three UK factories employ thousands of workers and support a vast network of small suppliers.
In Birmingham’s Castle Bromwich, where one of JLR’s main plants sits, workers spoke of tense weeks marked by uncertainty and lost income. “My husband and I both work here,” said Rachel Thompson, whose family depends on their dual wages from the plant. “When the factory closed, it wasn’t just about missing shifts. It was about whether we’d still have jobs in the long run.”
Some suppliers, unable to deliver components, began cutting hours or laying off staff. A recent survey showed several were only weeks away from running out of cash. “We’ve had to let go of five people already,” said Abdul Rahman, owner of a small machining firm in the West Midlands. “Without government support, we would’ve gone under by Christmas.”
Jaguar Land Rover, owned by India’s Tata Motors, normally produces around 1,000 vehicles a day across its facilities in Birmingham and Liverpool. The shutdown left partially assembled cars sitting idle on factory floors, costing the company millions in lost output and raising questions about its resilience against cyber threats.
The disruption also rippled into Britain’s broader automotive sector, which employs more than 180,000 people directly and supports hundreds of thousands more in logistics, retail, and manufacturing. For small firms tied into JLR’s ecosystem, cash flow dried up almost overnight.
Business Minister Peter Kyle called the cyberattack “not only an assault on an iconic British brand, but on our world-leading automotive sector.”
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