Honda quits Swindon: the winding-down project begins

Shuttering the Wiltshire plant will leave a community anxious for its future. Project managers must see out the closure with pride.

Japanese car maker Honda has confirmed the closure in 2021 of its Swindon plant, which employs 3,500 workers, to refocus resources on large electric-car markets outside the UK. The plant has operated in Swindon for nearly three decades, and another 3,500 jobs at suppliers dependent on the plant will be put at risk.

Honda is now preparing redundancy packages, finalising the timetable for the closure and working with the Swindon Task Force, set up by Secretary of State Greg Clark, to work with government and a broad range of stakeholders.

Closure priorities

When project managing the plant closure, the onus is on Honda to act responsibly for its people, the site and local businesses, says David Bailey, professor of business and economics at Birmingham Business School. “On people, that means communicating openly and frequently with workers and helping to make available training and retraining opportunities – in conjunction with outside agencies – to help them move on, as well as providing generous redundancy terms.

“The firm also needs to work with the task force to find alternative uses for the site, or look at other options. And with regard to local businesses, Honda could make available to the task force the names and addresses of suppliers – with their consent – so that efforts can be made to help diversify supply-chain activity away from Honda towards other auto players or even other sectors.”

Neil Crewdson, head of project management and capabilities at Sellafield – itself a 100-year decommissioning project – says that a priority for the project managers handling the closure is to rebuild some confidence in their mission of finishing the production of the Honda Civic, and to see it out with pride.

“We did something similar,” he says. “A large part of Sellafield was about reprocessing, and that’s been the business for the last 50 years. The first plant shut down last year, and we tried to instil a sense of ‘finishing our mission with pride’.”

Reskill and invest

But, Crewdson says, “It is easier for us at Sellafield because, for the next 10 to 20 years, we don’t foresee any redundancies. What we do see is a massive reskilling and retraining programme, and help finding employment and weaning the area off Sellafield. When we’ve faced downturns, we’ve done recruitment days for all large industries that want our skills.”

Sellafield expects to see a big drop-off in the number of its employees in 20 years’ time and is already investing in developing new facilities in the local community to house and encourage new start-ups and entrepreneurial businesses.

In terms of handling the media, Crewdson says Sellafield now prefers to enlist the help of advocates – such as Sellafield’s apprentices – to talk about the site, rather than using nuclear industry experts to get their messages across. “People don’t trust people in white coats any more; they moved away from deferring to experts.”

It also pays to be open in communicating with the national media. “We really try to be very transparent,” Crewdson says.