The battle over car production at Jaguar's Coventry plant intensified yesterday when the Transport and General Workers' Union leader, Tony Woodley, launched a bitter attack on the company.

Mr Woodley accused Jaguar's parent, Ford, of withholding information on planned cost savings which would have been routinely made available to works councils elsewhere in Europe.

He said the decision to switch production from Browns Lane to another Jaguar plant at Castle Bromwich - as part of a recovery plan which will mean the loss of 1,150 jobs - was driven by Ford's concerns to protect its credit rating in the US. "We are just sacrificial lambs," he said.

Mr Woodley said a cynic might say that taxpayers' money was being used to close down British jobs. Jaguar should repay £93m of taxpayers' money it had received.

"That is not right when they are not prepared to disclose the financial facts. It's outrageous."

Mr Woodley's comments came after a meeting he and the Amicus general secretary, Derek Simpson, had on Tuesday night with Mark Fields, Ford's senior executive in Europe, and on the day that both unions called a strike ballot their members at the Browns Lane plant.

Last night, Ford rejected Mr Woodley's criticisms. The recovery programme was being implemented because Jaguar was losing "hundreds of millions of pounds" and was not viable as it was - not because Ford was seeking to appease rating agencies, a spokesman said. It had the capacity to produce 200,000 vehicles a year, but was selling only about 120,000.

"We have to make cost savings and we have to improve our competitiveness in the marketplace," said the spokesman.

The job cuts among permanent employees would be entirely voluntary and 650 people at Browns Lane had already applied for the 400 voluntary redundancies being sought there.