The British shipyard Fairline Yachts is announcing 240 job cuts, due to the impact of the Covid crisis, but also due to the quarantine rules put in place by the Johnson government. These rules have been denounced by all the British industrial players.

It was on June 5th that the employees of Fairline Yachts Shipyard learned the bad news.

Fairline Yachts' workforce will be cut by almost half, with the 240 job cuts announced by the management of the motoryacht construction site based in Oundle. 

Fairline, which builds 33 to 68-foot yachts in three model ranges - F Line, Targa and Squadron - on two industrial sites, Hythe and Oundle (Peterborough), has so far employed 450 people, although a first wave of redundancies - 40 positions - was carried out last September.

The restructuring plan announced at Fairline will affect the various departments of the yard, which has so far put 320 of its employees out of work during the Covid Crisis.

During the last quarter, Fairline would have managed to build 15 yachts, 6 of which are currently in production, a volume clearly insufficient to sustain the current structure.

This situation is all the more difficult as the quarantine system in place in Great Britain prevents customers from coming to see their yachts, which is an additional brake on the restart of activity, and once again demonstrates the calamitous management of the Covid epidemic in Great Britain.

At the end of its restructuring process, Fairline Yachts is expected to have around 210 employees, its workforce for 2017. 

Fairline's difficulties are not all due to Covid, far from it, but also to a problem of industrial organisation, as the management of 2 production sites did not optimise yacht building processes, and the product offer had long suffered in the face of fierce competition.

The yard had already been placed in bankruptcy at the end of 2015, before being taken over by a Russian investor at the beginning of 2016, which allowed the brand to be relaunched with a bold product plan.