Jaguar Land Rover gets £1.5B government jump-start after cyber breakdown The UK government is stepping in with financial support for Jaguar Land Rover, providing it with a hefty loan as it continues to battle the fallout from a cyberattack. A government-backed loan to the tune of £1.5 billion ($2 billion) will be made available to the carmaker to support its recovery and the companies in its …
Outsource your IT to the Terminally Clueless Squad, watch your systems collapse, and then cry for help? Don’t worry - Labour will ride in with £1.5bn. With this safety net, why bother building secure systems at all? The message is clear: neglect your IT, and taxpayers will pick up the tab.
That's a semantic game that misses the point. Here’s why it's absolutely outsourcing.
Outsourcing is the practice of contracting a business function to an external party. Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Terminally Confused Squad (TCS) are separate legal and commercial entities with their own management, balance sheets, and objectives. JLR makes cars; TCS provides IT services.
The fact they share a parent company (Tata) simply makes it outsourcing to a sister company.
Think of it this way: If you own a restaurant and you pay your brother's separate plumbing company to fix your pipes, you've still outsourced your plumbing. You haven't done it "in-house."
From JLR's perspective, they contracted out their IT operations to a different company. That is the definition of outsourcing.
Yup......interesting that almost none of the press coverage actually mentions TATA by name!!
Wonder why???
And none of these articles goes into any detail about WHY this hack has been so devastating.
The Guardian is a notable exception ( providing mention of TATA and some explanation). See:
- Link: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/sep/20/jaguar-land-rover-hack-factories-cybersecurity-jlr
- Quote: 'The fact that “everything is connected” in JLR’s systems appears to have become a vulnerability. When it discovered the intrusion, the carmaker was unable to isolate factories or functions, forcing it to shut down most of its systems.'
So...................One source of the devastation caused by the hack is...........Tata Consulting deciding that "everything is connected"................Prize for this.........£1.5 billion underwritten by the UK taxpayer.
Really????
Tata is in the business of collecting bailouts and/or subsidies. £500 million for the Port Talbot steelworks.
Privately owned seems to equate with underwritten by the taxpayer.
Will the government give me a loan if my bike is stolen? If so, why not? That's three it already owes me.
Perhaps this loan guarantee is Labour's way of paying reparations without admitting to it ? Besides that was over 100 years ago, are they going to complain for the rest of eternity? By modern standards it is not right, but neither is outsourcing all our industry, skills and money. No wonder this country is in a mess.
JLR governance is clearly lacking. TCS was just a way to offshore the profits to Tata with overpriced IT. It's just another form of transfer pricing.
I must stop now, because I'm beginning to sound like Nigel Forage and his Orange Budha.
Surely the loans and support should be given to the JLR suppliers, who are suffering through no fault of their own, and not the JLR who (a) messed up and (b) are not about to go bankrupt?
How will JLR use this money? Will they pay their suppliers to supply nothing? Will they order Just-in-Time parts in advance, when they have nowhere to store them?
It all makes sense when you see the world through the eyes of this government: A government that's chaotic and disorganised, failing on most of the important issues of the day, looking at becoming even less popular with further tax rises in a month or two, and led by a prime minister with appalling approval ratings, worse even than Liz Truss.
But a test for you, put yourself in their shoes: Do you want to be further criticised for doing nothing as jobs disappear? Like Mr Micawber you're still hoping something will turn up to save the day in the next few years, but you can at least be seen to be doing something that might save a few Labour votes across the Midlands. Therefore you tout a huge sum of money as a loan, for the sole purposes of being seen to do something. They could offer loans to suppliers, problem is that whenever the civil service starts handing out money to multiple people it becomes a chaotic free for all, with huge sums being handed to thieves and liars without any adequate checks, and unless it's foreign aid government don't like that.
Bailing out JLR keeps jobs tied to an incompetent employer, but at a huge cost. It tells every company: cut corners, outsource IT offshore, neglect resilience - the taxpayer will rescue you. That doesn’t protect British workers, it strangles the domestic IT sector and locks people into bad jobs instead of creating better ones.
who are suffering through no fault of their own
They have not done their research and due diligence. If you take on a risky client (if you are outsourcing your IT to shop like TCS, the disaster is bound to happen), you demand payments upfront and ensure you are not dependent on that single client.
Look at who owns the shares.
They’re getting £1.5 billion because the elites who own all the shares are protecting their wealth with your money.
Your tax goes straight to companies they all own shares in. It’s how they transfer your hard earned cash to their bank accounts.
