Euston to be among biggest Scottish investments in decades

Programme Euston will be one of the most significant and sustained government investments in Scotland over the coming decades, the Ministry of Defence has said, with employment and training in the local area set to rise as the work gets under way.

The assessment was set out by the Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence, Lord Coaker, in response to a written question from the Labour peer Lord Beamish, who had asked what assessment the government had made of the number of apprenticeships that would be created in Scotland and the north-east of England under the programme.

Coaker said the programme would be “one of the most significant and sustained Government investments in Scotland over the coming decades”, and that employment and training in the local area would rise, with the investment driving “regional economic skills and social/environmental benefits further afield”.

On the specific figures Beamish had asked about, the minister said the commercial approach for delivering the dock and shoreside elements of the programme would be finalised as part of the investment decision to be outlined following the publication of the Defence Investment Plan, and that the actual number of UK-based jobs and apprenticeships “can only be assessed following completion of the procurement process”.

Programme Euston is the Royal Navy’s plan to build two floating dry docks to provide a resilient out-of-water engineering capability for its submarine fleet at HM Naval Base Clyde by the early 2030s, with a Programme Business Case due in the middle of this year and procurement decisions to follow. The scale of the investment, concentrated on the Clyde, is what underpins the minister’s billing of it as a decades-long boost for Scotland, even as the precise employment benefit remains tied to the still-undecided procurement.

That investment decision, and with it the commercial model and the resulting jobs picture, is bound to the Defence Investment Plan, the spending document the government has committed to publishing before next month’s NATO summit, which has become the single point on which a long line of capability and industrial decisions now depends.

Where the docks will actually be built remains the central unanswered question around the programme, with no contract award location yet chosen. Navantia UK’s Methil yard in Fife has openly positioned itself to build them, pointing to its transformation on the back of the Seahorse barge project, while unions have pressed for the work to stay in the United Kingdom, with GMB Scotland having warned the former Defence Secretary John Healey that building the docks abroad would amount to “national self-harming on a grand scale”.

The minister’s remark on the scale of the Scottish investment is likely to feed directly into that debate over how much of the work, and how many of the jobs, actually land in the United Kingdom.