Tata Agratas grant details
The UK government is providing between £380m and £510m in grants to support Tata Agratas’s planned Somerset EV battery gigafactory — a project pitched at 40 GWh capacity with an estimated 4,200 jobs and £60–100m a year in tax revenue. ( ) Business Secretary Peter Kyle visited the site April 9–11, and critics on social channels called the package ‘corporate welfare’, pointing to Enterprise Zone tax perks and the plant’s focus on supplying luxury JLR EVs. ( )
Britain has approved a £380 million grant for Tata Group’s battery arm Agratas to help build its electric vehicle battery factory in Somerset. (gov.uk) Business Secretary Peter Kyle announced the grant during a visit to the site on April 9, 2026. The Department for Business and Trade said the package sits within more than £700 million of advanced manufacturing support and is meant to expand domestic battery production. (gov.uk) Agratas is building the plant at the Gravity site near Bridgwater, a 616-acre Enterprise Zone in Somerset. Somerset Council says the factory is planned to reach 40 gigawatt-hours of annual output, enough for about 500,000 passenger vehicles. (somerset.gov.uk) The government said the project supports 4,200 direct jobs, thousands more in the supply chain, and 300 apprenticeships. Agratas executive Earl Wiggins said the Somerset plant will supply battery cells to Jaguar Land Rover, the Tata-owned carmaker that will be its anchor customer. (gov.uk) The grant matters because Britain has been trying to build battery plants close to its car factories instead of importing cells from abroad. The Advanced Propulsion Centre said the funding is being delivered through the Automotive Transformation Fund and tied it to the government’s push for zero-emission vehicle supply chains. (apcuk.co.uk) The same centre said the United Kingdom will need at least 75 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity by 2035 to meet expected demand. Sir Robert McAlpine, the delivery partner for Building One, says the Somerset project is expected to contribute almost half of the battery manufacturing capacity the United Kingdom automotive sector is projected to need by the early 2030s. (apcuk.co.uk, srm.com) Critics have focused on how much public support the site is receiving beyond the £380 million grant. The Gravity site has held Enterprise Zone status since 2017, which Somerset Council says brings incentives including simplified planning rules and local retention of business-rate income. (somerset.gov.uk) A separate local deal under discussion would let Agratas fund about £150 million of nearby infrastructure and, in exchange, keep business-rate relief for 25 years instead of paying those rates to the council. Somerset Council leader Bill Revans told the British Broadcasting Corporation in March that the arrangement would replace council borrowing for roads, training, and other site-related works; Agratas declined to comment at that stage. (finance.yahoo.com) Construction is already underway. Sir Robert McAlpine said in its January-to-April 2026 update that the main building’s steel frame and ancillary works were progressing, site access upgrades were largely complete, and the workforce was heading toward about 800 people at peak in that reporting period. (srm.com) The jobs push is also moving ahead before the factory opens. Skills England said on March 23 that it created a new battery-manufacturing apprenticeship unit after consultations with Agratas and other employers, describing the Somerset plant as a project expected to generate around 4,000 jobs and more than £700 million in annual economic value for the South West once fully operational. (gov.uk) For now, the clearest settled number is the grant itself: £380 million, announced on April 9. The bigger argument over how much public backing the Somerset plant receives will keep running alongside the build-out. (gov.uk, finance.yahoo.com)
