Taxi Driver Online

Manganese Bronze makes 156 redundancies

The administrators of Manganese Bronze, the Coventry-based company that makes London black cabs, are making 156 staff redundant with immediate effect. The announcement from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) comes just a day after it said it was in talks with an "encouraging" list of parties interested in the company's rescue.

The redundancies account for more than half of the firm's 274 UK employees. The Unite union said it was outraged at the "ruthless sacking" of staff.

PwC were officially appointed as administrators of the firm on Tuesday and had said they were looking at options to dispose of the business to an investor who could secure the future manufacturing of the black cab. They said they had been appointed due to a "combination of poor UK sales, supply chain issues, and high warranty costs", compounded by accounting errors discovered in the first half of 2012 and the discovery of a steering fault that led to the recall of about 400 vehicles and a suspension of sales.

But in a statement on Wednesday, PwC said: "Regretfully, without financial support to overcome the group's operational issues we have had to make staff redundancies. "While the steering box recall remains, there is a voluntary suspension on vehicle sales, and we are now concentrating all resources on testing the solution to the steering fault.

"We have retained sufficient numbers of staff across the dealership, head office and production network to address the operational, technical and financial circumstances that the business faces."

Unite national officer for the automotive industry, Roger Maddison, said: "Only last night PwC were telling us there were significant interested parties. Now the administrators are ruthlessly sacking over 150 highly skilled workers at the iconic black cab maker.

"The black cabs are world famous and we believe this company has a future. How can PwC treat this company as a going concern with virtually no staff? "The black cab is part of Britain's car manufacturing heritage. The government must now be on standby to save this historic company from being left to the vultures."

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IDFIMH

It is only a going concern WITHOUT any staff UK workers cost too much compared to Chinese Turkish or Mexican in a global market which is unfortunate as British workers tend to be very skilled and produce high quality products

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lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector

What about those who supply service parts and other bits, if they cannot get paid, they wont supply, all the former LTI cabs across the Uk could be off

this when it pays to know who supplied parts cos LTI only made the chassis/bodies, everything else was bought in, BUT, having said that, the suppliers themselves (despite having been stung) will offer themselves up to supply any new owners

now then, ive just bought a stillage of steering boxes if anyone needs one...

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

BTW, i worked at a firm (parts) that went under, we had a great month operating under the receivers who hadnt got a clue about the business

i did well

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

Hopefully they will be as distant a memory as LDV vans soon....

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most