Billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s petrochemicals group Ineos has announced plans to cut 60 jobs at its Hull Acetyls plant in East Yorkshire, citing “dirt-cheap, carbon-heavy imports from China” and “sky-high” UK energy costs.
The redundancies represent around a fifth of the site’s workforce, and follow the closure earlier this year of Ineos’s Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland, which led to hundreds of job losses.
David Brooks, divisional chief executive of Ineos Acetyls, said the decision was “not taken lightly” but that the business had been left with “no other choice” in the face of “sustained pressure from energy costs” and unfair competition from low-cost Chinese imports.
Ineos said the UK chemicals sector was being “crippled” by anti-competitive trade practices from China, as cheap products flood European markets. The company warned that without stronger trade protections from the UK government and the European Commission, further job losses could follow across its operations.
“This is a textbook case of the UK and Europe sleepwalking into deindustrialisation,” Brooks said. “If governments don’t act now on energy, carbon and trade, we will keep losing factories, skills and jobs. And once these plants shut, they never come back.”
The job cuts in Hull coincide with the loss of 175 positions at Ineos sites in Rheinberg, Germany, also attributed to displaced Chinese exports that have been redirected to Europe following tariffs imposed by the United States under former President Donald Trump’s protectionist trade measures.
Ineos recently invested £30 million to convert the Hull facility to hydrogen power, part of a wider effort to decarbonise operations. The plant produces acetyl chemicals used in pharmaceuticals, adhesives and industrial coatings, including ingredients for aspirin and paracetamol.
Despite the investment, Ineos said high energy prices and unlevel global competition were undermining the UK’s industrial base.
The latest cuts extend a pattern of downsizing across Ineos’s European operations. Since 2019, the group has closed sites at Grangemouth in Scotland and Geel in Belgium, with further closures under way in Gladbeck, Germany. Other facilities in Tavaux (France) and Martorell (Spain) have been mothballed.
Ineos, which employs 24,500 people across 29 businesses in 27 countries, warned that without stronger industrial strategy and trade defences, Britain risks losing more high-value manufacturing capacity.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe, 72, whose fortune is estimated at £17 billion, has expanded Ineos beyond petrochemicals into sport and automotive ventures, including co-ownership of Manchester United, backing the Mercedes Formula 1 team and launching the Ineos Grenadier 4×4 brand.
The company said it remains committed to investing in UK manufacturing but called for urgent government action to address what it described as “anti-competitive” energy and trade conditions.
