Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is to cut up to 500 management jobs in the UK, as the carmaker faces pressure on sales and profits from US trade tariffs.

JLR said it would launch a voluntary redundancy scheme, and that the cuts were not expected to exceed 1.5% of its British workforce. The firm described the move as “normal business practice”.

Last week, the carmaker revealed a drop in sales in the three months to June caused partly by it pausing exports to the US because of tariffs and also due to the planned wind-down of older Jaguar models.

The company warned last month that US President Donald Trump’s decision to impose a 10% tariff on British cars exported to the US would hit its profits.

JLR said it “regularly offers eligible employees voluntary redundancy” and said the current programme was based on “the business’s current and future needs”.

It added that the UK-US trade deal on car imports gives it “confidence to invest £3.5bn” per year.

Car industry expert Professor David Bailey of the Birmingham Business School said the tariffs “play a big role” in the job cuts.

“It wasn’t that long ago that JLR was reporting bumper profits – £2.5bn profit to the year ending in March – which was its best results in a decade,” he told the BBC’s Wake Up to Money programme.

The firm has also been taking on workers in preparation for producing more electric cars so the tariffs “have definitely had an impact”, he said.

As part of a wave of tariff announcements made by Trump earlier this year, UK exports of UK cars and automotive parts faced an extra 25% tax, on top of an existing 2.5% levy. This led to JLR pausing shipments of its vehicles to the US.

However, the UK-US deal saw the tariff cut to 10% for a maximum of 100,000 UK cars, which matches the number of these vehicles that the UK exported last year.

Despite this, Prof Bailey said the new rate is still “a big increase” from the previous tariff of 2.5%, adding that one of its best selling cars, the Defender, is made in Slovakia and that still faces a 27.5% tariff.

Downing Street rejected “absolutely” any suggestion that JLR’s job cuts were a personal embarrassment for Sir Keir Starmer, who visited the company in May and declared it was his intention to protect British jobs in the car industry.

A spokesperson for the PM said the UK-US trade deal was “jobs saved, not job done”, adding that JLR was “responding to challenging global conditions” in making the cuts.

JLR is a large employer in the UK automotive sector with more than 30,000 workers.

It has sites in Solihull, Wolverhampton and Halewood on Merseyside, and builds Range Rover SUV models in the UK.

Speaking before JLR made its announcement about job cuts, Preet Kaur Gill, Labour MP for Edgbaston in Birmingham, said the UK’s recent trade deal with the US had helped to preserve jobs at the company.

“In my region, Jaguar Land Rover is a really important employer. The fact that we’ve managed to save 12,000 jobs, bring tariffs down… this is an ongoing relationship and our commitment is to make sure we continue that,” she said.

While the economy started this year strongly, Wednesday saw another example of a surprise to the markets in the wrong direction.

In May the economy slowed again, and now inflation has quickened faster than expected. It is expected to stay well above the Bank of England’s target level until autumn.

For consumers, still reeling from years of higher prices and a recent pickup in food prices, the new number is less a surprise, more the confirmation of their ordinary day-to-day challenges.

On top of that, and just as important for some people, the bounce in inflation complicates the Bank’s rate cut plan.

Investors have been treating it as pretty much nailed on that rates will come down again in August, from the current 4.25%.

Now there is definitely a sense of renewed caution.

A former rate setter at the Bank, the economist Andrew Sentance, even said it would be “irresponsible” for interest rates to be cut next month.

Expectations remain that the cut in August and another one later in the year will go ahead.

But the Bank will have to explain why it is looking beyond this current rise in inflation, into next year’s expected drop-back to the 2% target.

It will mean the return of old questions around whether the UK is more inflation-prone than other countries, for example because of increasing wage and tax costs being passed on in the form of higher prices.

A weakening jobs market is another part of the deliberations. The latest employment figures will be published on Thursday.

If, as expected, they show a continued fall in vacancies, then that strengthens the argument for going ahead with a cut in rates. Bloomberg is predicting a 4.9% unemployment rate, up from the 4.6% reported last month.

But as always it is important to keep all the figures in perspective.

True, other major economies have not seen a similar bounce in inflation. The eurozone’s latest inflation rate is just 2%. But inflation is nowhere near the highs of the energy crisis, and will come down as energy prices fall in the autumn.

Growth is definitely slowing, but we are not in recession, and the very latest activity figures suggest recovery in some sectors.