Government ‘pledged £80m to Nissan’

The UK pledged £80m in support to Japanese car giant Nissan in 2016 to get it to stay in the UK after the Brexit vote, a leaked letter indicates.

But the pledge depended on continued production of the Qashqai and X-Trail models at the carmaker’s Sunderland plant, the Financial Times reported.

The report comes a day after Nissan said it was going to make the X-Trail in Japan instead.

Meanwhile, a government minister has said Nissan will still get its money.

Business and Industry Minister Richard Harrington told BBC Newcastle that £60m already given to Nissan by the government would not have to be repaid.

He said the money was not tied to X-Trail cars, but was linked to alternative technologies – developing electric cars and making sure the next generation of Qashqai cars could be electric.

In October 2016, Nissan said it would build both the new Qashqai and the X-Trail SUV at its Sunderland plant, following government “support and assurances”.

The nature of those assurances was not made public, despite Freedom of Information requests from the BBC and others.

However, the FT said it has now obtained a copy of the letter that Business Secretary Greg Clark wrote to then Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn.

The newspaper said the letter contained comments by Mr Clark that it would be “a critical priority of our [Brexit] negotiations to support UK car manufacturers”.

But on Sunday, when Nissan announced its decision to move X-Trail production out of the UK, the firm’s Europe chairman, Gianluca de Ficchy, said that “the continued uncertainty around the UK’s future relationship with the EU is not helping companies like ours to plan for the future”.

Nissan said the leaked letter was “no longer commercially sensitive, as it contains nothing that hasn’t been disclosed publicly before”.