Contractors put finishing touches to bids for £4bn Tata battery factory in Somerset

Tenders go in this month with a winner due this springBidders are expected to return tenders later this month for the chance to build a huge car battery plant in Somerset for Tata.The Indian firm said it and its subsidiary Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) would be the anchor customers for the new factory.The news was announced last July and will see a massive new electric vehicle battery plant built at the Gravity Business Park near Bridgwater.Building understands that firms including ISG, Wates and Laing O’Rourke, which built a design and engineering studio for JLR at Gaydon in Warwickshire, have all looked at the job, believed to be worth more than £600m, which is part of a wider £4bn spend at the site.Mace is understood to be looking at a consultant role only with others on the job including T&T as cost manager.Once bids go in, a decision is expected later in the spring with the new factory set to begin supplying units from 2026. The scheme is being masterminded by Tata’s global battery business which is called Agratas.ISG was working on the stalled gigafactory scheme in Northumberland which was put on hold in 2022 because of funding issues while Wates began work at the end of that year on a new gigafactory in Sunderland for Japanese electric vehicle battery technology company Envision AESC.The Somerset scheme is expected to create around 4,000 jobs at the factory alone and thousands more in supply chains.The business park it will be built on is a 616-acre, so-called “smart campus” being built near the M5 motorway at Puriton. The scheme, a former Royal Ordnance factory, is being developed by private banker Salamanca.Work on the complex first began in 2019 with Welsh contractor Alun Griffiths building a link road to connect the site directly to the M5 at junction 23.