Why Coventry is the right place for a Gigafactory - Video and audio transcripts

Hello, I’m Councillor Jim O'Boyle I’m here at Coventry Airport because last week it was granted planning permission from both Warwick District Council and Coventry City Council to build the biggest Gigafactory in Europe on this particular site. I'm here with Louise Bennett, the Chief Executive of Coventry Warwickshire Chamber of Commerce. Louise, what does this mean both for the economy of Coventry and Warwickshire but also what do you want to see from investment to make this dream a reality?

It just makes business sense Jim doesn't it, to have the Gigafactory here. The creation of over 6 000 highly skilled jobs, high-value jobs in the area. Do you know it will protect over a hundred thousand jobs that are already sitting within our automotive manufacturing and engineering supply chain that we have in this locality? And looking at it from a business perspective the synergies are there so we have all of the assets in this area manufacturing technology centre, Warwick manufacturing group Horiba Mira in our north, the supply chain itself, the universities Coventry Warwick. We have all of the assets here that make absolute sense to sit alongside the Gigafactory so that we can be leading edge in electrification and new battery technology it just makes business sense.

And skills are really important in terms of making this a reality as well of course because we need to invest in skills both in our schools and colleges but also in businesses.

We do need to invest in skills and the better the investment in high-value skills the more wealth that you create in an economy and the more wealth you create the more we pay our taxes and the more we can support all of our public services so it makes absolute sense. and of course, here in this locality, we're already outcropping engineers from the university-led technical college over at Warwick University, we have two fantastic colleges in the area, we've got our universities so I think we can really really do the job in terms of having the investment in the Gigafactory here.

So the right location we've got the right skills the right companies the right businesses what we need now is the government and the industry to come together to make this decision to make this happen it's all ready let's make this happen six thousand direct jobs maybe three times that indirect let's bring back direct manufacturing back to Coventry.