Government sees ‘opportunity to do more’ at Inchgreen

The Government believes there is scope to do more with the Inchgreen dry dock on the lower Clyde, Defence Minister Luke Pollard has said, after the Chancellor allocated £20 million to the Inverclyde facility, one of the largest dry docks in the UK.

Asked by the UK Defence Journal at a briefing on Project Royal Oak whether Inchgreen now falls within the naval base upgrade programme and whether there is scope for warship docking at the site, Pollard set out how the investment sits alongside, rather than within, the £26 billion base modernisation effort.

The naval base funding is “in addition to the £50 million defence growth deal that is aiming to go after SMEs and skills in particular, the DTEC offer of creating two Defence Technical Excellence Colleges in Scotland that we hope the Scottish Government will match fund, and the £20 million that was allocated by the Chancellor for Inchgreen, where we feel as a government there’s an opportunity to do more with that really important facility,” he said.

The Minister did not expand on what future use the dock might be put to, though he told the briefing that further detail on what is being spent across the wider programme will be announced later this summer and into the autumn. The press release accompanying Royal Oak describes the Inchgreen investment as part of the Government’s commitment to backing key maritime industries on the River Clyde, revitalising the dock to further strengthen national and industrial resilience, supporting the creation of 350 direct jobs and providing a new skills centre.

The dock, at Greenock, has seen only intermittent use in recent decades despite long-running local campaigns for its revival, and its 305-metre length makes it one of the few facilities in the UK theoretically capable of taking the largest vessels.

On the naval base programme itself, Pollard said Royal Oak is about renewing infrastructure that “in many cases, has been deteriorating for quite some time,” with some facilities across all three bases reaching the end of their life and unable to be extended. “If we want to move to warfighting readiness, which is our stated number one objective as defence, we need to renew our facilities. That means making big capital investments,” he told the UK Defence Journal.

The wider Scottish picture set out on Tuesday includes £15.1 billion for Faslane under the programme, which the Ministry of Defence describes as the largest naval infrastructure investment since the end of the Cold War, alongside the completed purchase of the Finnart Oil Terminal. That multi-million-pound acquisition expands the Royal Navy’s sovereign fuel-holding capacity and, according to the department, provides the additional space needed to progress the Clyde Transformation Programme while delivering value for taxpayers by making use of existing infrastructure.

More than £240 million in RAF sustainment contracts at Lossiemouth completes a package the Government argues demonstrates growing defence investment north of the border, with Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander saying it will deliver “a defence dividend for Scottish communities,” as quoted in the announcement.