Today (April 8th) marks 20 years since MG Rover went into administration, bringing to an end a hundred years in which “the Austin” – as the Longbridge factory has always been known – became the most famous vehicle manufacturing plant in the country.
Assembly of a limited range of cars restarted at Longbridge within a couple of years after that day and continued for a few more. But 2005 was the watershed. Volume manufacturing at Longbridge was at an end; over 6,000 MG Rover workers lost their jobs in a body blow that hit not only the car industry but the identity of that part of Birmingham and the people who lived here.
I represented the area in Parliament for 27 years and it remains my home to this day. In 2015 I secured a debate in Parliament reflecting on the events that led to the collapse of MG Rover, on what had happened in the ten years since then and what the future may hold – both for the Longbridge area itself and for government industrial and employment policy. I published a link to the debate on my website here.
20 years have now passed since that fateful day in April 2005 and what has happened?
Many of the recommendations I made to ministers in that debate in 2015 were not taken up by the Conservative governments that were in office until last year. I hope the Labour government that has replaced them will revisit some of what I was saying when I was an MP as part of their agenda to reform the industrial and employment landscape in the UK, particularly as Britain faces brutal economic headwinds coming from the policies now being introduced by the Trump administration in the USA.
What about the plant?
So what happened to the Longbridge plant? The picture is mixed. Under the ownership of Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC), all vehicle assembly at Longbridge ceased in 2016. Along with the then Business Secretary, Greg Clark, MP, I lobbied SAIC intensively to change their minds but the company was not for turning. It was regrettable but, given the economic model they were pursuing, it was not hugely surprising.
But there was potentially a more serious decision to come. From 2009 onwards, SAIC had invested millions in the acquisition of a high-powered engineering team from Ricardo in Leamington Spa to create a new SAIC Motor Technical Centre at Longbridge (SMTC). The plan was for SMTC to become a global hub for research and development. SAIC later also built a new design studio at Longbridge. I still believe that both could have continued to add real value to the company as well as to the industrial and skills base of the West Midlands for many years to come.
Unfortunately, in a shift in policy, SAIC decided to close SMTC and the design studio, to relocate a scaled-down version of both to its new company HQ on Marylebone Road in London. Again there was intensive lobbying to get SAIC to change their minds. The arguments we put forward to retain SMTC and design at Longbridge were sound but, once again, SAIC refused to budge.
Today, MG Motor remains at Longbridge and both the UK and Chinese flags flutter at the site of what used to be the main Q gate entrance to Longbridge in its heyday. MG Motor now has an impressive range of electric and other vehicles which are selling well in the UK. The teams at Marylebone have had important roles in the development of those models and some MG Motor employees at Longbridge still play a part in identifying routes for technical development, in after-sales and in dealer upskilling. But they now number just a few dozen at Longbridge. After 2005, there was never going to be a return to what was there before. But, if SMTC had remained at Longbridge, it could still have been very different today.
I wish we could have persuaded SAIC to change their minds there.
What about the place?
Even if Rover’s return never came to Longbridge after 2005, there have been important developments. Led by site owners and property developers St Modwen, Longbridge became one of the biggest regeneration projects in the UK.
A new Longbridge town centre today occupies much of the land, with a focus on retail, office development and housing. As a result of one of the last major educational investment decisions of the 2005–2010 Labour Government, a new college campus was also constructed on the site and today South and City College dominates the Longbridge skyline. Across the road from the town centre, Longbridge Technology Park offers important bases for both start-up and step-on businesses.
Looking across the Bristol Road that used to dissect the old MG Rover plant, the former West Works site is being transformed with a combination of housing and employment developments underpinned by road infrastructure changes. There is large accommodation block for medical personnel nearby, together with a major veterinary referral hospital. Waters, a US company which is a global leader in instrumentation serving the life and food sciences sectors, has built a new precision engineering centre on the former West Works, and active marketing is continuing to attract more investment projects to the former West Works.
South-west Birmingham’s River Rea used to run directly under West Works, unseen and culverted. In an impressive injection of sustainability and biodiversity to the regeneration of the former MG Rover site, St Modwen have brought the River Rea back into the open air alongside a newly planted orchard and walkway linking the nearby Great Park reservoir and Balaam’s Wood to the Austin Park that was created in Longbridge town centre a few years ago.
Together, those parts of the regeneration are a real boost to the quality of life for people living in the area and a regular walk for me as one of them.
Physically, the last major phase of the redevelopment will be next to the area on which MG Motor retain a base, taking in the land once occupied by the CAB 1 and CAB 2 buildings which long housed Austin, Rover and MG assembly lines, as well with the former company’s main onsite office buildings and an iconic round exhibition centre long known as The Elephant House.
What is going to happen there? Outline plans submitted to Birmingham City Council and reported by the Birmingham Mail last year envisaged a mixed-use but housing-led redevelopment.
The plans mainly involve new-build but with a promise to retain the Elephant House. Exactly how far those plans have now advanced is uncertain, although insiders suggest that in practice, this phase will be more accurately described as a major housing development than a mixed-use one.
Hopefully, whatever happens there will retain the Elephant House, the last recognizable part of Longbridge’s car making heritage on-site. I say “on-site” because you can today still see the original office of the factory’s founder, Herbert Austin, recreated in meticulous detail, at the British Motor Museum at Gaydon, Warwickshire.
Impressive though some of these developments have been, could the physical regeneration of Longbridge have been more ambitious? I think there could have been more active support from both local and national government after 2010. Before then, the Regional Development Agency, Advantage West Midlands, was an active partner in planning a new future for Longbridge. Its abolition by the incoming Conservative–Liberal Democrat government that year left a big institutional and resource gap in support for regeneration.
Locally, I encouraged Birmingham City Council to develop an economic strategy for the area that I called the Climb Project. But at a time when the Birmingham was being hit by swingeing government cutbacks, it never made it into the Council’s list of priorities.
As the MP for the Longbridge area, I was also constantly on the lookout for potential investors, including trying to persuade luxury car maker, Aston Martin, to choose Longbridge for the new factory they were planning. They were more than receptive but ultimately the inability of any government body in the West Midlands to offer much in the way of investment incentives meant we lost out to those offered by the Welsh Development Agency for a site in south Wales.
None of this is to take away from the success which St Modwen has achieved in attracting new businesses to Longbridge in recent years, and there is little doubt that the efforts of the West Midlands Mayor after 2017 helped fill some of the infrastructure investment gaps that had been left by the abolition of Advantage West Midlands. Without that abolition, though, a lot more could have been done earlier to boost regeneration and new jobs the Longbridge.
What about the people?
From Herbert Austin onwards, Longbridge was synonymous with car making for a hundred years. But, it was about so much more than that. As a public art installation there still proclaims “it wasn’t about cars. It was about people.” And it was. The factory became not only the area’s main source of employment, it was central to the identity of the people who lived in that part of Birmingham.
That is why the body blow that was inflicted in 2005 was felt so acutely.
The events that took place between 2000, when the Longbridge plant almost closed, and 2005, when MG Rover finally collapsed, added to the body blow and its legacy. I wrote on my website about many of those events as they were occurring and I looked back on them in the Parliamentary debate I secured in 2015, on the 10th anniversary of the collapse. In that debate, I described how the work of MG Rover workers in keeping the Longbridge plant going in those five years between 2000 and 2005 bought the manufacturing base of the West Midlands vital time to diversify and modernize, so that the total job loss across the region was a lot less than it would have been if the company had gone under in 2000. But for the 6,000 people still working at Longbridge in 2005, the eventual impact on them and their families was 100%.
For that, as a region, we owed them both gratitude and a commitment to build a new future for the area.
There were also more immediate debts that MG Rover workers were owed. In 2015 and again today I would have liked to have been able to pay tribute to the so-called “Phoenix 4”, the consortium who took over Longbridge and rebranded it as MG Rover after BMW suddenly jettisoned the former Rover Group in 2000. I would have liked to pay tribute to them for leading a brave but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stabilize the company and find a long-term partner to continue volume manufacturing at Longbridge, while also buying the region vital time to diversify even if Longbridge itself could not survive for the long term.
Those were the stated objectives of Phoenix Project which Government ministers, trade unions and I as the local MP embraced when we worked to keep Longbridge in business back in 2000, and stood by the company in the years that followed.
Unfortunately, the Phoenix 4 betrayed our trust, and more importantly the trust of their own workforce. It wasn’t that they didn’t want Longbridge to survive. Of course they did. But that survival – and the future of their workers – proved to be second order issues compared to their systematic enrichment of themselves. The spider’s web of companies that the Phoenix 4 quietly created between 2000 and 2004 made sure that they would personally be royally insulated in the event that MG Rover went under while their employees would be left brutally exposed with even their pensions under threat.
The actions of Phoenix 4 were analysed in detail by an independent investigation commissioned by ministers after the 2005 collapse. The two-volume report still makes devastating reading.
Even then, the Phoenix 4 could have salvaged at least some of their own reputations if they had made good on a promise to create a trust to help cushion MG Rover workers in the event of company failure. The trust was formally established but it never received the funding it needed to do anything. The Phoenix 4 might even have put their hands in their own pockets to help. They did not do so. They will never be forgiven.
When they lost their jobs in 2005, Longbridge workers became unsecured creditors of MG Rover and the allied companies which had collapsed. But they had to wait many years for even a modest share of the proceeds from the winding up of those companies’ affairs. It involved protracted legal disputes over ownership, HMRC wrangles and it cost millions of pounds in liquidators’ fees. After an earlier notice of potential issued by liquidators PwC in 2018, final dividends were only confirmed as recently as 2022. Overall, the amounts of money involved in the liquidation were substantial. The sums that found their way back to individual workers as creditors were less so.
What about the future?
The 2022 notice to creditors may have been the final chapter in the liquidation of MG Rover and other Phoenix companies, but it is not and it cannot be the final chapter for the people of the Longbridge area.
Important physical developments have taken place and are still unfolding at the site of “The Austin” but it is not just about buildings any more than it was ever just about cars.
This is an area that has been seriously impacted by economic and social change over the past four decades. Many of those changes predate and go far beyond what happened to car making at Longbridge in 2005 and reflect the transitions that many other communities living in former industrial towns and on the industrial outskirts of other big cities have faced.
But the collapse of MG Rover was an important part of the picture and it contributed to the legacy that has been left in this part of Birmingham. It is a legacy that has had a profound effect not only on those who had worked at The Austin themselves but also on the life chances of generations growing up and reaching adulthood today. In the heyday of car making, Longbridge was regarded as a relatively prosperous working class area. Today, though, Birmingham Northfield, in which Longbridge sits, is the 24th most deprived parliamentary constituency in the country. Median pay levels for people living here are persistently below the averages for both the West Midlands and the UK as a whole. Relative child poverty rates in Northfield stood at 30.6% in 2023/24 – up from 18.6% in 2014/15.
The constituency has more people with no qualifications than both the West Midlands and national averages, and fewer people with higher education qualifications. Last year, fewer people from Northfield started apprenticeships than in 2018/19.
Figures like these underline just how much more there is to do to build a future that enables the people of this area to fulfill their potential. A targeted economic strategy to build aspiration, skills and opportunities across the communities of South West Birmingham is as important today as it was when MG Rover collapsed in 2005.
