Select committee led by Hilary Benn will also seek to understand why city people voted so resoundingly to leave the EU

MPs are visiting Sunderland on Thursday to take evidence from local politicians and business representatives on the consequences of Britain leaving the EU.

The new Exiting the European Union select committee will ask key figures from the city and wider north-east what they want from the Brexit negotiations.

The committee, led by the Labour MP Hilary Benn, will also seek to understand why Sunderland voted so resoundingly to leave the EU.

To some outsiders, Sunderland’s 61.3% vote in favour of leaving the European Union didn’t seem to make sense. “What about Nissan?” they asked. The Japanese car company provides 7,000 jobs at its plant in Washington, a few miles out of the city, and supports a further 40,000 in the UK supply chain. About 80% of the 500,000 cars the plant produces each year are exported, many to the EU.

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Others questioned how a region so reliant on EU funds could opt to leave the union that dished out the money. Sunderland has received more than £23m of direct investment from Europe since 2007, complemented by more than £130m of region-wide business support services accessible to a wide range of Sunderland firms, according to a report commissioned by the city’s economic leadership board before the referendum.

The result was not much of a surprise to many people living in Sunderland, however. John Kelly, a Labour councillor for Washington North, which includes the Nissan plant, defied his party line by voting to leave.

He told the Guardian that his constituents had been failed by globalisation. “My ward is one of the most deprived in the city of Sunderland and we weren’t seeing anything coming to us [from the EU]. Nissan has a fantastic workforce, is a fantastic employer, fantastic output, but that wasn’t being seen on the ground in Washington,” he said.

“Europe had become a symbol of globalisation. I’m a local ward representative and to me I’ve got to represent the best interests of my ward and I genuinely didn’t think that Europe was doing that for us any more. Globalisation and the fact that people have been forgotten about in the race to make money, that’s what has an impact on my residents.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A cheer reportedly rang through the Nissan factory when news of the leave vote came through. Photograph: Michael Adamucci/Reuters

Many Nissan workers voted to leave – a cheer reportedly rang through the factory on the night shift when Sunderland’s vote came through, with one employee telling the Guardian later that 19 out of 20 workers on his Infiniti luxury car production line had voted out.

They, like Kelly, believed firmly that Nissan would not leave Washington – and they were proved right when, in late October, Nissan announced it was not only staying but would build two new models there.

“There was no way on earth that Nissan, or Renault, the partners in [the] plant, were ever going to sacrifice a plant that has the highest output, the best workforce, the least amount of strikes,” said Kelly. He does not believe the EU will impose tariffs on Nissan. “It won’t happen because the Germans sell to us as many cars as we sell to them. Charge us 10% [extra], we’ll charge them 10%,” he said.

Though Nissan’s future in Sunderland is secure for now, many businesses in the supply chain are faring less well. AV Dawson, a logistics company that transports and delivers the steel used to make Nissans, saw 15-year, multimillion-pound contracts fall through within days of the Brexit vote.

“It has been a real rollercoaster,” said Charlie Nettle, the company’s marketing and business development manager. “We saw it mostly in the construction sector, where we had three businesses that were looking to work with us who pulled out overnight because of loss of confidence due to Brexit. It was scary really to see that happen quite so quickly.”

AV Dawson’s directors made it clear to their workforce that they would be voting to stay in the EU, yet the majority of their employees voted the other way, said Nettle.

[Nissan leaving] was scaremongering. The quality of work we can produce in England is much greater than anywhere else Jordan Griffiths

Crane operator Ronnie Johnson, 64, said he never doubted that Nissan would stay in Sunderland, even when its chairman, Carlos Ghosn, issued a fairly bald threat in late September that it may pull out of the north-east if it was unable to extract “compensation” from the government.

“Don’t you think they were holding the government to ransom? Saying ‘if you don’t give me this, we’ll go?’” he said. His colleague Jordan Griffiths, 24, also voted out. “In my personal opinion it was scaremongering. I always thought that the quality of work that we can produce in England is much greater than anywhere else. So if they really want top quality they are not going to go over just a couple of quid.”

He said he expected the uncompromising response from European leaders, who are determined that the UK should not get a better deal outside the EU. “Leaving, they were always going to make it hard for us because they don’t want other countries to follow us and leave Europe. But I think in the long run everything will be better for it,” he said, adding that for the first time “it did make you feel like you counted this time around”.

Giving evidence to the select committee in Sunderland on Thursday will be Richard Baker, the head of policy and strategy at the North East Local Enterprise Partnership; John Elliott, the executive chairman of Ebac – which manufactures dehumidifiers and watercoolers in the north-east – and representative of campaign group Business for Britain in the north-east; Ross Smith, the director of policy at the north-east England chamber of commerce; and councillor Paul Watson, the leader of Sunderland city council and chair of the North East Combined Authority.