Land Rover has announced that it will be looking for 1000 redundancies at its Solihull plant in 2003. The carmaker hopes that most of the job cuts will be achieved through a voluntary redundancy package and natural wastage.

A Land Rover spokesman told AM: “This is part of the 2003 business plan and is a way of rebalancing productivity targets.”

The redundancies have been negotiated with union chiefs. At the last round of redundancy negotiations, in September, Tony Woodley, deputy leader of the TGWU had described the Ford/Land Rover policy as a “twice yearly cull to remove the surplus headcount gained through productivity agreements in the previous six months.”