Northamptonshire MPs recommend county for new Tesla factory

Two Northamptonshire MPs have written to Tesla boss Elon Musk urging him to consider the county as a potential site for a new factory.

This comes after Musk flew to London last month as the Government had asked local authorities to prepare bids for a new electric vehicle Gigafactory.

Former business secretary Andrea Leadsom and Andrew Lewer, MP for Northamptonshire South, penned an open letter to Musk claiming that the county’s motorsport and transport links make it the perfect location for a new site.

Leadsom said: “Northamptonshire, at the centre of motorsport valley is a global force in high-performance engineering.

“We have the talent, the infrastructure and the cutting-edge research architecture in high-end manufacturing and battery technology that makes Northamptonshire a very attractive proposition for global leaders like Tesla.

“Motorsport Valley has around 4,300 companies that employs 41,000 people. It spends almost twice as much of its turnover on research and development than the pharmaceutical industry, in places like the Silverstone Technology Cluster in my constituency.

“Forward thinking and innovative automotive and mobility businesses would come here to benefit enormously by being so near such a powerhouse of research and high-end engineering capability.”

Lewer added: “We highlighted in our letter the strengths of Northamptonshire strategic location at the heart of the UK strategic logistics and supply chain with Northamptonshire and the South East Midlands central to one of the most significant UK government regional investment programmes, the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, which will turbo charge our area’s R&D, science, technology and performance engineering capability on a global platform over the next decade.

“I am fully behind the Oxford Cambridge Arc programme with SEMLEP (South East Midlands Local Enterprise Partnership) and the new West Northamptonshire Council to make Northamptonshire and the region the best place in Britain for businesses like Tesla to locate.”