South Marston Honda: About 90 compulsory job losses at car plant

The car maker Honda has confirmed about 90 compulsory redundancies will be made at its Swindon plant.

Earlier this year the company said 800 posts would be lost at its South Marston factory.

Hundreds have volunteered to go and there will be no compulsory shop floor job losses.

Unite union spokesman, Jim D'Avila, said it was positive that nine out of 10 of the redundancies would be voluntary.

"We're as pleased as we can be given that 90 people are still losing their jobs against their will," Mr D'Avila said.

In January the company announced it would be looking to close 800 posts - including 360 production jobs - and carried out a consultation process between the union and affected staff.

A company spokesman said within the production areas there were more volunteers than redundancies but within the support areas this was not the case.

"There'll be about 90 posts to go but there is some fine tuning still needed with the exact numbers and we've got about another two weeks of discussions to go with associates," he said.

The firm, which started making cars in Swindon in 1992, has blamed falling sales across Europe for the drop in demand.

The plant produces the Civic, Jazz and CR-V models.

It built 166,000 cars in 2012, which was well below the capacity of 250,000.