The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has outlined efforts to enhance productivity and accelerate delivery of the Type 26 frigates.
In a written response to Mark Francois MP, Maria Eagle, Minister of State for Defence, acknowledged the delays but detailed key investments to improve build times at BAE Systems’ Govan shipyard.
Eagle explained: “Investment in new facilities at Govan to increase productivity include a new Shipbuilding Outfit Hall, Shipbuilding Academy and steelwork panel lines. The new Shipbuilding Hall will enable the construction of two ships undercover simultaneously. This will improve schedule performance and the pace of delivery, allowing the time between ship deliveries to be reduced.”
The £300 million investment in Govan, including the development of the Janet Harvey Hall, aims to reduce construction time for the frigates. BAE Systems has ambitious goals to shorten the build duration from 96 months for the first vessel to 60 months for the eighth, while compressing the interval between ship deliveries from 18 months to 12 months.
Sir Simon Lister, Managing Director of BAE Systems Naval Ships, spoke to myself and other journalists earlier this year on this, telling us:
“We aim to reduce the build duration from the first of class being 96 months to the eighth being 60 months. More than that, we intend to compress the interval between ships from 18 months to 12. Being able to do that gives the gives us and gives the government choice. The quicker you build something that cheaper to build something. The improvement in productivity puts us in a good position for future work.”
The Janet Harvey Hall, named after a pioneering World War II shipyard electrician, will play a critical role in achieving these targets. The state-of-the-art facility will enable the construction of two frigates side-by-side under one roof and feature advanced technology, including robotic welding systems and heavy-lift cranes. The hall will sustain 1,700 jobs in Scotland and support 2,300 jobs across the UK supply chain.
Despite the delays, Maria Eagle assured Parliament that there would be no operational impact on the Royal Navy: “This will not result in a capability gap; Type 26 will be a world-beating frigate, and the class will be delivered in time to take on the anti-submarine warfare duties of the retiring Type 23 ships.”
The Type 26 frigates are essential to the Royal Navy’s anti-submarine warfare capabilities, as well as supporting broader missions such as counter-piracy, and humanitarian operations.
The first four frigates – HMS Glasgow, HMS Cardiff, HMS Belfast, and HMS Birmingham – are already under construction, with future deliveries expected to align with the improved build timelines.
Canada did this earlier this year to Irving in Halifax for the River Class. Looks like Canada will have to do another investment to speed this up. Having completion date 25 years form now is not sitting well with the Canadian public.
I remember George Osborne proudly staring into the cameras in Portsmouth declaring that the UK will henceforth build an escort every two years. His precious drumbeat. Forced an uneconomic and inefficient rate of build in order to minimize Treasury annual payments. 2nd worst CoE ever.
Well Gordon Brown was the worst, Racheal Reeves has made a great start for being second worse.
In many ways he was one of the best chancellors. Benefit caps. Public sector pay cuts. But yes, he eviscerated the armed forces…. but then again which Chancellor hasn’t!
Yep. I didn’t really appreciate what he was up to at the time but I can now see he was the architect of so many of our current problems.
He saw the 2008 GFC as an opportunity to cut back the size of the public sector. And we can all see the result of his headline grabbing approach: anemic growth, poor productivity and the spiralling decline of our public services, not least Defence.
The UK has had one of the lowest investment rates (both private and public) of any developed country for decades now and his approach effectively double-downed on this short-termist approach.
Utterly moronic.
5 years to build a frigate or destroyer is an absolute joke . Any time span more than 5yrs is just criminal and a total neglect of defence of the realm
Yes. You only have to look at JMSDF’s Mogami’s. Concept defined in 2015, shipyards selected in 2017, building started in 2019, and the first pair commissioned in 2022. the next late 2022 and early 2023, and the next pair this year. These are sophisticated gas turbine ships built from a new design. Compare and contrast with T31.
The quicker you build something the cheaper it is. Well that’s not entirely true. If I remove all the manaul labour from a product line but it takes 20% longer to build it will be cheaper. On the flip side I double the manpower and only get a 30% decrease in Production time it’s costing me more. I’ve been to too many factories in my career where labour is thrown at problems to solve Production problems effectively reducing productivity.
It’s good BAe are updating the build processes and investing but lets be honest this is just playing catchup other yards around the globe having been building this way for years.
Thats the thing if you have the orders and the money is spent you can build the ships, the RNs problem as well as the ship builders is the fact the orders were not made and even when they were the money was not spent.
Essentially the UK could produce 2 warships a year, if each warship has a life of 25 years that’s active 50 warships or about 20,000 tones of warship a year, Which gives the potential for a navy of:
30 major surface combatants ( 12 AAW, 9ASW and 9GP/ASuW).
6 MRSS
5-6 patrol vessels/ mine warfare vessels
2 carriers
But it means that the government must keep the tick of orders and that steel must be cut on time and not delayed due to overlong and delayed development.
To be honest that’s the sort of navy we should have been aiming for all along.
30 major combatants was sustainably wishful in 1995. Even with a production rate of two major vessels a year, we really can only keep about 20 combatants and the patrol fleet active at once. Building ships designed to serve for 10-15 years then sell them on or scrap them with the idea of maintaining a constant fighting fleet of ~20 highly modernized & competitive vessels with extremely high readiness rates as a result of them being young hulls (8 ASW, 8 AAW & 4-5 GP hulls hypothetically) would be better – you can keep up the ship yards with a realistic drum beat of 1-2 ships delivered a year without them then having to survive 10 year gaps before the next orders, selling them off subsidized costs and newer ships means newer systems can be incorporated when they’re built instead of take them out of the fleet for 5 years at a time for MLUs and refits that cost as much as a new ships. It’s how the navy maintained it’s mass, the government look after the ship yards and we always had the newest systems (SeaCat, Wolf and Dart being ahead of the curve when they were each introduced respectively as an example) through much of the Cold War.
There’s little point making a huge 25 year plan to solely build mass and have a grand fleet for ~10 years afterwards, we tried that in the 80s & 90s and it’s left a huge mess now as it didn’t make economical sense to maintain all those ship classes when the specific threat they were built for no longer existed but at the same time they were to young to start replacing with modern vessels suited to our current needs so plans got gapped and almost killed the industry.
SeaCat was not ahead of anything.
I wonder what other NATO countries and the Chinese and russian build timeline is compared to our jokers
Did a simple Google search on how long it takes China to build a destroyer – first one up said ‘China typically takes two and a half to three years to build a destroyer or frigate-sized vessel. This is much faster than the average of seven to eight years in other countries.’
I suppose we have to wonder about such fast build times and quality of work perhaps?
The class will be delivered in time to take on the duties of the retiring ships? Really? If that was true they are already several years late then! These people really do talk our of their arse.
Hopefully there are more knowledgeable people on here than me. Are any of the retired T23 the ASW variant? If yes then this statement…..
“This will not result in a capability gap; Type 26 will be a world-beating frigate, and the class will be delivered in time to take on the anti-submarine warfare duties of the retiring Type 23 ships.”
…..is literally a bare faced lie. If all the retired T23 are GP then she is correct.
Not necessarily, a frigate in (towards the end) build is basically in the same position as a frigate in refit ( ie. Not operational), so if a ship reaches the end of its life and is scrapped instead of being refitted then a ship in build with a completion date equivalent to the return of the (scrapped) ship would have been if it had been refitted is the perfect scenario.
Correct some are ASW !
HMS Northumberland and HMS Westminster were both ASW frigates
The Hull fabrication is only the first part of the construction process, it does indeed look like this is picking up pace.
However, the fitting-out processes now seem to be the bottleneck now
Everyone involved should be pulling out all the stops to get HMS Glasgow and HMS Venturer commissioned within an urgent timescale (say 18 months) geopolitical events will simply not wait another 5 years for us to be ready
Yup, l believe in unicorns that fart fairy dust.
The caveat to BAe speeding builds up is that the investment “can” speed it up, not they will ! What’s missing from Sir Simon Listers quote from April this year is it is completely reliant on more orders be they more T26, MRSS or T83 otherwise it all goes bang, no work means no money hence redundancy’s.
As for the “delays” that’s a bit spurious as the T26 build is actually on the agreed contractual schedule as per MOD agreement.
Its political diversion to cover the truth which is BAe is doing what it has been paid to do, no more and no less but has always been capable of better if the funding (orders) dictate that. What makes it far worse is that the only real reason we have a capability gap is previous Governments just didn’t order the replacements to arrive before the T23 expire.
First 3 T26 B1’s would be slow (hence expensive) due to being 1st of class, how they have to be built and the MOD payment schedule, B2’s will be quicker due to the new facilities (hence the lower price for the 5 ordered).
Cicero said, “the sinews of war are infinite money”, UK politicians ignore that fact and just exercise the sinews of their jaws and keep the wallet shut.
And as for the timing it’s pretty convenient that yesterday Starmer was in Norway regarding joint defence cooperation, and if BAe land their Frigate contract it just happens to provide the orders needed to boost the build schedule at zero cost to HMG.
So that may sound like me being a Cynic or perhaps just a realist you can take your pick.
IMHO this is just political window dressing to cover their own inept inactivity and the prime cause goes right back 2010 and has never changed, there is an ingrained hatred of Defence spending in the UK political and Treasury mindsets.
That is born out by one simple overriding fact which is there hasn’t been one single extra warship ordered for the RN this decade ! Despite Russia invading Ukraine and threatening us 😡
Come to think of it other than some Archer SPGs that may apply to the Army and RAF as well, correct me if I’m wrong 🤷🏼♂️ Lots of words, lots of projects but so far no orders.
Not necessarily, a frigate in (towards the end) build is basically in the same position as a frigate in refit ( ie. Not operational), so if a ship reaches the end of its life and is scrapped instead of being refitted then a ship in build with a completion date equivalent to the return of the (scrapped) ship would have been if it had been refitted is the perfect scenario.
The problem we have is lack of long term investment and not enough people
Yeah the UK has always benefited from immigration not that certain groups with agendas to push will tell you that
Given we have had high to very high levels of immigration for a quarter of a century you would think the U.K. economy would be booming. Like a lot of simplistic statements both for and against it just isn’t that simple.
An economic model based on cheap low skilled immigrants, poor levels of investment and training leads to our current predicament.
Until we get away from that short sightedness and incentivise innovation, training, investment whilst pulling in limited numbers of high quality people into the U.K. we will not progress.
Good news. Well done Bae. Now, how about two more T26 and three more T31 from Babcock. That would be a real Christmas present for the Royal Navy..
We’ll need all the speed and productivity we can if we were to win the Norwegian naval competition. I would be tempted to keep the existing hall going and have 3 ships under construction simultaneously.
The PM was in Norway yesterday and most probably discussing the T26 for the Norwegians? Any new news regarding this?