ADL to move chassis production to Falkirk

Alexander Dennis Limited (ADL) intends to transfer chassis production to its Falkirk factory.

This will impact around 200 employees in manufacturing and operational support roles at Guildford. Non-manufacturing functions including Engineering, Test & Development and Aftermarket will continue to be based at the Guildford site. The change follows experience of vertical integration at its facilities in North America and the Asia Pacific region, where building chassis and body on the same site has demonstrated efficiencies in terms of output, time, cost and co-ordination.

The current lack of demand for new buses and coaches will also mean the potential loss of 90 production jobs in Scarborough and a net reduction of 160 manufacturing roles in Falkirk, even with chassis assembly transferred to that site. As the company adjusts its overhead to the change in manufacturing activity, a further 200 roles will be affected in support functions across all UK sites. ADL is actively seeking voluntary redundancies to reduce the number of compulsory job losses.

ADL has begun the formal consultation on its previously announced restructuring programme. The manufacturer says the move puts up to 650 jobs at risk across all of the company’s UK facilities.

The restructuring programme is in response to the significant fall in demand for new buses and coaches in the United Kingdom as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Since announcing the possibility of cutting jobs on 27 July, it says there remains no immediate visibility of the stimulus funding urgently required to support operators to place orders, which it says makes it necessary to begin the formal consultation on the proposed changes.

The restructuring programme is designed to adjust current capacity without compromising the company’s ability to respond to a resurgence of demand in the future.

ADL President & Managing Director, Paul Davies, says: “The Dennis brand is of huge significance to the company, with its proud history and heritage of automotive innovation dating back to its inception in 1895. We will fight hard to protect this legacy and will continue to invest in our chassis product range, which will continue to be engineered in Guildford.

“We have no choice but to implement these tough decisions to protect the company’s future health. We remain confident that the situation will improve in time, and we are well placed to take advantage when that happens, but right now we have to adjust to our new economic reality.

“We continue to call upon the UK and Scottish Governments to urgently introduce meaningful support to facilitate demand for new buses and coaches, not only to prevent further damage to UK bus and coach manufacturing that could threaten additional production sites, but to help build back better with a green recovery that delivers cleaner air for our towns and cities. The installed UK fleet is currently approximately 50,000 buses and 21,000 coaches with an average age of nearly 11 years. Further, only 0.1% of the total fleet are electric, which provides opportunity for massive reduction of the environmental footprint.”