Agratas puts 2,900 on a Somerset site. JLR is cutting 4,000.

The first building at Agratas, Tata’s battery plant on the old ordnance site near Bridgwater, is nearly watertight. Fit-out follows. Somerset Council has been told construction will rise to 2,500–2,900 people this autumn. Cells are still aimed at late-2027, for Jaguar Land Rover. Natarajan Chandrasekaran walked the site days after JLR said it would cut 4,000 jobs, part of it blamed on a delayed turn to electric.

That is the UK EV problem in one visit. The cell plant is being built for a car company that has slowed the switch. The factory and the customer are in different gears. Neither fact is a scandal. Together they are a volume plan that does not yet add up.

Agratas is a £4 billion bet on 40 GWh, on paper, across a 616-acre brownfield that used to make munitions. Opening slipped from 2026 to late-2027. In June the contractor, Sir Robert McAlpine, ‘mutually agreed to part ways’ after the first phase; TSL took over because Agratas wanted a different delivery model for fit-out. Contractor changes on a dry-room build are not cosmetics. They are a schedule risk with a new name on the helmet.

JLR’s first battery Jaguars are expected on the road next year on cells from Agratas’s existing plant in Gujarat. Bridgwater is supposed to feed Range Rover and Jaguar lines in the West Midlands from 2028. JLR has said it will stop combustion engines in 2036. Four thousand jobs coming out now, while the sister company hires builders, is what a delayed EV ramp looks like from inside a group that is funding both sides of the mismatch.

2,900

Construction workers Agratas expects on site this autumn

4,000

Jobs JLR is cutting

Late-2027

First Bridgwater cells, current public date

AESC in Sunderland is the other UK gigafactory of scale, next to Nissan. In August it delayed a third line after talks to supply JLR stalled and Nissan’s own electric ramp softened. Two lines run. The third does not. Nissan still talks about more lines for itself; the long-term plan and the present offtake are not the same document. Chinese-owned AESC and Tata-owned Agratas are now the UK’s battery policy, whether Whitehall writes it that way or not.

Modules are running. Cell trials have just started

Gigafactory reporting loves the GWh number. The building is a dry room, a formation hall, and a warehouse for electrode foil. Humidity is the process. A contractor change in June, from Sir Robert McAlpine to TSL, after ‘the first phase,’ is the moment the job stops being a shed and starts being a process plant. Fit-out is where schedules slip: air handling, cleanliness, the equipment that cannot sit in a damp hall. Agratas said it needed a different delivery model to stay on late-2027. That sentence is a schedule risk written as a staffing update.

The first Jaguars on the road next year will not wait for Somerset. They will use Gujarat. Bridgwater is then supposed to feed West Midlands lines from 2028. JLR’s combustion end-date is 2036. Four thousand jobs coming out now, while the sister company hires builders, is a group funding both sides of a mismatch and still having to choose. Tata can afford the contradiction longer than a standalone battery company could. It cannot afford it forever. AESC, watching JLR from Sunderland, already blinked.

New AutoMotive’s audit this month put more than £7 billion across fourteen-odd UK battery projects and £4.2 billion of existing turnover. Pipeline is not output. Cornwall lithium and Durham brines are years from a cell. Envision AESC’s 15.8 GWh in Sunderland is real and constrained by the cars next door. Agratas is a hole in the ground becoming a dry room. The country does not yet have a matched car programme for the capacity it is pouring.

A gigafactory without offtake is a warehouse. A car programme without cells is a slide. This week they are both. The work on the Somerset site this winter is construction and clean dry-room kit. The work in Gaydon is which model year is actually on Bridgwater cells, and which is still on an import from Gujarat. Those two dates should be on the same page. They are not, yet.