Type 45 destroyers could stay in service beyond 2035

The Royal Navy’s six Type 45 destroyers could remain in service beyond their planned retirement from 2035, with a life extension now the subject of a funded study rather than something the department has ruled out, according to a written answer published this week.

Luke Pollard, Minister of State for Defence Readiness and Industry, was responding to James Cartlidge, the Conservative MP for South Suffolk, who had asked whether the department plans to implement a full life extension to the fleet.

Mr Pollard said: “The Defence Investment Plan has allocated a specific funding line within this parliament to conduct a study on the transition between Type 45 and the Hybrid Navy Maritime Air Defence capability, including whether a life extension will be required. As previously stated, this will be assessed in 2027-28.”

That sits a considerable distance from where the department stood two months ago, when the publication of the Defence Investment Plan on 30 June was accompanied by a senior defence official confirming to us that the six destroyers would leave service from 2035 without a life extension, with £1.3 billion of additional funding going into the hybrid fleet intended to replace them over the decade that follows.

The plan itself stated that a new hybrid maritime air defence system, consisting of uncrewed missile platforms designated Type 91 and sensor platforms designated Type 94 with a Common Combat Vessel serving as command hub, would “ultimately replace our Type 45 destroyers, which are scheduled to begin retiring from service from 2035”.

The position first softened in July, when an answer to Ben Obese-Jecty turned an extension into an open question to be settled through transition planning with industry, and this week’s reply goes further by putting a date on that process and attaching a funding line to it.

An extension would buy the Royal Navy time it does not currently have, because on the plan as it stands the destroyers begin leaving service in 2035 whether or not the systems intended to replace them are ready, and keeping the ships beyond that point is the only mechanism available for covering a delay in the hybrid fleet.

The replacements remain at an early stage, with a prototype Type 91 uncrewed missile platform intended to be in service by 2030 but no service entry date yet set for the class, while the Common Combat Vessel is still in initial design with hull form options being explored and does not appear as a firm commitment until the 2030 to 2035 tranche of the investment plan, which speaks of building at least six.

The upgrades position sharpens the arithmetic further, because the missile system improvements now being carried out on the class complete in 2032, which on the plan as published in June would have delivered an enhanced capability three years before the ships it improves began leaving service, an outcome the analyst Francis Tusa described in a paper last month as a wasteful upgrade for only three years’ planned use while calling for a ten-year Capability Sustainment Programme instead.

The Type 83 destroyer, which was to have replaced the Type 45 as a conventional crewed warship, was cancelled in favour of the Common Combat Vessel and the distributed uncrewed architecture built around it, leaving the study announced this week as the mechanism through which the potential gap between the two fleets will be managed.