Vestas has confirmed the closure of two sites on the Isle of Wight and Southampton with the loss of 425 jobs. Employees at both factories were informed of the decision today.
The closures follow a sit-in protest by 11 employees which began on July 20 and ended on August 7 after the company obtained a repossession order and sent in bailiffs to remove the protesters.
The protest was hugely embarrassing for the government at a time when it is promoting wind energy and green jobs. The Vestas plant was the only one in the country making components for wind turbines. The protesters gained considerable support from trades union groups and environmentalists.
The company said that 40 employees had been found new roles within the Vestas research and development facility on the Isle of Wight. A further 57 employees will continue to work at the factory to assist with its closure.
"The decision to close the factory was very difficult, and we fully recognise the impact this will have on employees, their families and on the Isle of Wight," said Ole Borup Jakobsen, president of Vestas Blades. "Nonetheless, this commercial decision was absolutely necessary to secure Vestas' competiveness and create a regional balance between production and the demand for wind turbines."
Despite confirmation of the factory's closure, the company's chief executive confirmed that staff redundancy benefits, which were withdrawn from the protesting workers, were under review.
Speaking exclusively to the Guardian, Ditlev Engel said that the company is planning to look again at the decision to strip the workers of their redundancy package because of their involvement in the protest.
"The last thing that we wanted was to have this confrontation," he said. "We will go back and see what it is that we can do going forward and also for all the people affected because we only had one wish and that was to try to do this in the best possible way. Coming back to the 11 people, we will have to revisit, to look at that as well."
Asked whether this meant that Vestas would reconsider its decision to remove the redundancy package from the men who occupied the plant, Engel said: "I am not ruling anything out."
Vestas has previously said that UK planning laws are a major barrier to wind energy development and that they were one of the reasons for the company's decision to pull out. "It is clear there is a need for reviewing [planning laws] in the UK," said Engel. "Nimbyism is also an issue."
He said that the UK government was failing to put its plans for more renewable energy into practice. "In the UK there is a clear division between what the government would like to see happening and what certain local politicians want to see happening, or rather not want to see happening … there is not necessarily the same ambition levels."
He also said that the government needed to invest in the electricity transmission grid to make it more friendly to wind energy.
"A major challenge in the UK is the future grid investment which needs to take place," he said.
Vestas first announced plans to shut manufacturing at the Isle of Wight factory in April saying it could produce blades more cheaply in America.
Vestas Wind Systems confirmed yesterday that its plant in Newport, Isle of Wight, England has closed. The workers employed there have received their redundancy notices.

425 jobs were lost in the factory closure and that of Vestas's Southampton facility, with a further 40 employees beginning work at Vestas's research & development facility on the island and 57 staying on to help close the factory down. Initial estimates had said that 575 jobs would be lost in the Newport and Southampton facilities' closure, with a further 50 lost in the closure of facilities elsewhere on the Isle of Wight.

The Newport plant had originally been planned to close on July 31. From July 20, it was the site of an eighteen-day occupation in which a group of Vestas workers entered the plant and lived in it, refusing to leave until the company offered a better redundancy package or until the government nationalised the plant, which is the only major producer of wind turbines in the United Kingdom. The closure comes shortly after Joan Ruddock, Britain's Minister for Climate Change, stated in an interview that the British government would not pursue nationalisation.

Vestas attribute the shutdown of the plant to insufficient demand in the United Kingdom due to difficulties in obtaining planning permission for on-shore wind farms, and closed the plant in part of a 1,900-job closure affecting facilities both in Britain and in the company's home country of Denmark. The president of Vestas's blades division called the closures "absolutely necessary to secure Vestas' competitiveness and create a regional balance between production and the demand for wind turbines". Vestas CEO Ditlev Engel, meanwhile, told ''The Guardian'' that he was "not ruling out" restoring the redundancy packages to the 11 occupiers who were terminated while taking part in the occupation. "The last thing that we wanted was to have this confrontation", Engel said.

A number of protest camps remain at Vestas facilities across the Isle of Wight, including outside the Newport factory, and seven anarcho-environmentalist protesters are living atop the roof of the Vestas facility at Venture Quays. A number of Vestas employees spent Wednesday speaking at solidarity meetings throughout the United Kingdom arranged by members of the informal coalition of left, environmentalist and trade union groups which sprung up to support the Vestas employees after the closure was announced.