AS FAR as timing is concerned, the announcement that car production at Cowley is to swing back towards some week-round operation couldn’t have come at a better moment.

Mini — celebrating its 50th birthday — is looking a little healthier again in its middle age.

The German owners of the BMW plant at Cowley have announced the factory responsible for making the iconic car is to take on 250 temporary staff for three months and resume some seven-day-a-week production.

While BMW is preaching caution, it has been an uncertain few months in which hundreds of staff were laid off and the long-term future of car-making in Oxford was brought into question.

The news is a fillip to some of those agency staff let go earlier in the year and to Oxford as a whole.

We were always told the Mini and the Cowley car plant were better placed than other manufacturers to weather the economic storm. So it hopefully appears.

The original Mini already has a place among the pantheon of great cars.

Production of the second generation of the car proved to be something of a masterstroke.

The Mini is synonymous with Oxford and to watch its production decline, and with it the inevitable job losses, would have been an extremely painful exercise.

Let’s hope yesterday’s good news is followed up with further increased order books and growing production as we slowly ease our way out of the economic doom and gloom.

Although this news is to be celebrated, the way BMW sacked some of its agency staff earlier this years remains a shameful and unsavoury episode and one that will take a long time to erase from the memory.

Let us hope that period is never repeated.