Vauxhall's Ellesmere Port car plant in north-west England has been given a year to improve its productivity or face closure, senior General Motors executives warned today.
The plant, which employs 2,900 people, is one of four GM plants in Europe competing to build a replacement for the group's best-selling Astra model. The others are Antwerp, Belgium, Bochum, Germany and a new, low-cost Polish plant at Gliwice.
Carl-Peter Forster, GM Europe's president, said at the annual motor show in Geneva that a decision on where to build the new car would be taken early next year but admitted that the plants were in "brutal" competition. "Internal competition is what drives performance," he said.
Mr Forster said Ellesmere Port had not yet reached the "benchmark" standard of taking 15 hours to produce a car that had already been attained by the group's Eisenach plant in eastern Germany.
"As a team they have got to come together and improve their operational performance," he said. "They've come a long way and have done a good job but they are not there yet."
He insisted that the selection criteria included productivity, flexibility, logistics and the scale of investment required to construct the new car but the attitude of the plant's team was paramount.
"Where we locate the car is a commitment for eight years," he said. "What I am looking for is a very sound proposal from the Ellesmere Port team."
The Gliwice plant, which produced 130,000 cars last year compared with the British plant's 189,000, has an in-built advantage through its lower costs which enables it to build cars several hundred euros cheaper.
The Bochum plant was saved last year after workers agreed on a pay freeze - and longer hours.
Mr Forster made plain that none of the group's plants in western Europe had a guaranteed future even after the shedding of 10,000 jobs in a painful restructuring started in 2004, designed to cut costs by €500m (£339.9) and help GM achieve break even in Europe after years of losses.
"We might be forced to close plants in future," he said, saying any new capacity would be built in eastern and central Europe from now on.
