Two more Type 23 Frigates being retired soon

Two more of the Royal Navy’s Type 23 frigates are to be retired as the ageing class begins a phased withdrawal running up to 2033, the Defence Investment Plan said.

The two further retirements were spelt out by the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, Luke Pollard, who told journalists the poor material state of many of the ageing ships was a serious factor behind the decision, noting that he spoke as the member of parliament for the Devonport constituency where the Type 23s are refitted.

In the document itself, the change was discussed as part of a wider reset, with the plan saying that putting the shipbuilding pipeline back in order had forced “hard but necessary decisions,” among them the phased retirement of the older Type 23s after decades of service, while new ships were due to come online across the same window.

The Duke-class frigates had until now been expected to serve to around 2035, so the 2033 date in the plan draws a line under the class a little sooner than the Navy had been saying.

The significance of two more departures lies in how few are left as the frigate force has already fallen to around five ships fit to deploy after a run of retirements that took HMS Lancaster out of service late last year and HMS Iron Duke this spring, with HMS Richmond due to follow before the end of the year, so a further cut falls on a fleet already stretched thin across carrier escort duties, the protection of the deterrent submarines and standing NATO tasks.

The Type 23s were built for a life of around eighteen years, and many are now into their fourth decade, worn by corrosion that costly life-extension refits have slowed but not stopped, which is the reason the Navy has struggled to keep them at sea as long as it once intended.

That difficulty has produced some uncomfortable value-for-money episodes, with Iron Duke withdrawn barely sixteen months after a refit that cost the taxpayer more than a hundred million pounds, the kind of outcome that has drawn pointed criticism from naval commentators. Pollard laid the blame for the wider squeeze on the late ordering of the replacements, the Type 26 and Type 31, which he said should have been ordered earlier by the previous government and were not, a delay he argued had also held back the dockyard work the fleet depends on, and he pointed to 10 Dock at Devonport, which he said should have been started sooner, and to Project Royal Oak, which he called “the biggest naval base upgrade in 50 years.”

Pollard spoke about the decision inside the broader reshaping of the surface fleet, in which the planned Type 83 destroyer and Type 32 frigate, both inherited from the last government as concepts with no money attached to them, have been dropped in favour of a common combat vessel and a hybrid navy in which uncrewed platforms operate alongside crewed warships. “I can’t field a CGI against Putin,” he said of the cancelled designs, arguing that funds tied up in unfunded artists’ impressions were better spent on ships the Royal Navy could actually put to sea, and that the new uncrewed sensor and missile platforms named in the plan would sail with the frigates rather than replace them outright.

The replacements are in build in Scotland, with Type 26 anti-submarine frigates under construction by BAE Systems on the Clyde, the first of them HMS Glasgow due to start sea trials this year, and five Type 31 general-purpose frigates being built by Babcock at Rosyth, the thirteen ships together meant to restore the escort fleet over the coming decade.

Some of the Type 26s will be operated jointly with Norway under a ten-billion-pound deal that Britain has presented as a reinforcement of NATO’s northern flank, an arrangement that has also prompted questions among naval observers about whether ships from the production run could be sent abroad and leave the Royal Navy short of the eight it has promised itself.