Anatomy of a Plant Closure: Mg Rover in International Comparison

In May 2005, MG Rover's car manufacturing plant in the UK's second largest city, Birmingham went into administration with the loss of 6,300 jobs and with far reaching effects across the supply chain. This was the largest mass scale redundancy in the country since British Steel, twenty years before.

The impact on the community was far reaching and the UK Government sought to determine a response at the national, regional and local level while a Task Force was set up to look into ways of helping workers and their families deal with and come to terms with the effects of the closure.

This book analyses the impact of the closure of the Longbridge plant at all stages, drawing comparisons with similar events in the Canadian, Australian and American auto-industries while analysing the policy response and effort of retraining undertaken at the local and national levels.

David Bailey is Professor of Industrial Strategy at Aston Business School, Birmingham United Kingdom

Gill Bentley is in the Department of Management at the University of Birmingham, UK