Jaguar Land Rover submits detailed plans for expansion of Castle Bromwich

JAGUAR Land Rover has submitted detailed plans for an expansion of facilities at its Castle Bromwich plant.

The company is investing £400m into the plant to support production of the all-new Jaguar XF.

As such, a number of organisational changes are needed to the site in order to cope with the increased capacity.

The company has been accumulating a landbank surrounding the Castle Bromwich site; a strategy that has seen it acquire the former Showcase Cinema plot, a former Frankie and Benny’s restaurant more controversially, the former Dunlop Motorsport tyre factory.

Together the footprint of these sites stretches to almost 60 hectares and chief amongst the new developments will be a multi-storey staff car park, together with space to park 767 newly-manufactured cars ahead of their dispatch.

The plans also include two new warehouses and storage buildings, which will support the expanded production operation.

In its planning submission, the company said: “To increase the operational efficiency of our site, we plan to construct two new warehouse and storage buildings and a multi-storey car park, on land close to our manufacturing facility.

“Together, these developments will bring benefits for the facility and our neighbours by:
–    increasing the number of car parking spaces we have available for our products and our employees, which helps to prevent parking on local roads
–    allowing quicker access to components and providing additional storage space for parts, which can easily be accessed from the existing site
–    ensuring that parts and materials can be moved between buildings on site, rather than via local roads.”

The storage and warehouse buildings will provide a state of the art facility to hold materials and parts associated with the manufacturing process. This is an important requirement, which will increase the operational efficiency of the site.

The building proposals have been planned and designed so that delivery vehicles can access the site with ease and park efficiently, which helps to prevent any traffic from queuing on local roads.

Within the buildings, machinery is needed to lift and carry materials so rooms have been designed to accommodate them.

“The proposals for a new multi-storey car park will make a huge difference to local people and our colleagues when it becomes operational,” added the company.

More than 2,000 parking spaces will be created when the structure is finished. Around 370 of those spaces with be used for a car share scheme.

The new car park will increase the existing car parking capacity for employees at the plant. The existing surface car park accommodates 1,122 vehicles. These proposals increase the capacity to 2,009.

“It is necessary to increase the number of parking spaces, for both employee and product parking, in order to support new shift arrangements and a wider product range,” added the company.

As part of its investment into the facility, a new state of the art aluminium body shop has been completed and significant improvements have been made to other parts of the plant including a new blanking press shop.

“This planned investment will further improve the operational efficiency of the plant and will help to ensure that the Castle Bromwich manufacturing facility supports the company’s continued growth, maintaining and enhancing Jaguar Land Rover’s position within the UK’s advanced manufacturing economy,” adds the company.

The layout of the new facility.