Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover has drafted a new 4.5-billion pounds cost-cutting plan to offset rising emissions cost and the slowdown in China, one of the biggest automotive markets in the world.

The project — known as Leap 4.5 — will scrutinise almost every area of spending at Britain’s luxury car manufacturer, The Sunday Times reported.

The 3-billion-a-year pounds capital budget, focused on research and development and new plants, will be spared.

JLR has been one of Britain’s biggest success stories since it was bought over by Tata Motors from Ford in 2008.

It made a profit of 2.6-billion pounds last year and has almost 37,000 staff and builds about 5,00,000 cars a year.

It has spent around 11 billion pounds on a new range of cars, new plants in China and India, with another under way in Brazil, and has overhauled its three British manufacturing plants.

It aims to build one million cars a year by 2020. Sources close to JLR said that it was a natural time to take stock after such rapid growth and insisted that there were no plans for redundancies.

Sales in China from July to September were down by a third YoY to 20,149 cars, against a wider market fall of 1.9 per cent.

That drop was offset by strong growth in America and Europe. It also faced a 245-million pounds charge on 5,800 vehicles damaged in the huge explosion at the Chinese port of Tianjin in August.

JLR also faces pressure from regulators to cut its emissions or face hefty fines, the newspaper reported.