Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what recent estimate he has made of the number of people in (a) the West Midlands, (b) Coventry and (c) Coventry North East constituency that are employed in the automotive industry.

Latest available data from the Business Registers and Employment Survey, which is part of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), shows that in 2020 there were 53,000 people employed in the automotive manufacturing sector in the West Midlands region.

Of those 1,750 were in the North East Coventry constituency and 5,000 in the South Coventry constituency. Similarly, the wholesale, retail trade, and repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles industry employed 1,500 people in each of the constituencies in 2020.

The Government remains fully committed to working in partnership with industry to support the automotive sector’s transition to zero emission vehicles. As part of the Net Zero Strategy, in October 2021, Government announced a further £350m to be delivered through the Automotive Transformation Fund over the next three years to support development of an internationally competitive electric vehicle supply chain here in the UK. This will create thousands of well-paid green jobs in our industrial heartlands, including the West Midlands.