HMS Iron Duke has been withdrawn from active service, leaving the Royal Navy with just five operational Type 23 frigates, NavyLookout has revealed.
The naval analysis website broke the story today in a detailed piece well worth reading in full, reporting that Iron Duke has been stripped of her weapons and sensors and has not been to sea since October 2024, with no formal decommissioning announcement made despite her effective removal from the fleet.
The withdrawal comes less than three years after a £103 million refit that by any measure was extraordinary in its scope. The work took 49 months and more than 1.7 million man-hours, and was described as the most complex ever carried out on a Type 23.
Iron Duke had been laid up in Portsmouth since 2017 and arrived at Devonport in such poor condition that the structural work on her hull was almost twice what had been needed on any previous ship in the class.
As we reported last year, Iron Duke was very much in active service as recently as October, when she and her Wildcat helicopter from 825 Naval Air Squadron spent three days tracking the Russian Kilo-class submarine Novorossiysk and her support tug through the English Channel near Ushant before handing over to a NATO partner as the vessels moved into the North Sea. Armed Forces Minister Al Carns said at the time that Russian vessels had been passing through the Channel more frequently and that the Navy was watching around the clock.
We also reported that the MoD had scrapped a plan to fit Iron Duke with a Type 2087 towed array sonar from a decommissioning sister ship. Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard confirmed in a written answer that after a comprehensive assessment, the numbers simply did not work. Given “the platform’s remaining service life, the time required to complete the conversion, and competing operational priorities, the benefits of proceeding did not justify the additional cost or extended period out of service,” he said, with resources re-prioritised elsewhere.
NavyLookout’s full piece on Iron Duke is at navylookout.com and goes into considerably more detail on what her withdrawal means for the surface fleet.
Another warship quietly withdrawn – Royal Navy now down to just 5 frigates
The relief
The Type 23 fleet has been shrinking steadily as ships reach the end of their service lives, and Iron Duke’s departure leaves the Royal Navy in an increasingly stretched position ahead of the Type 26 City-class frigates entering service. Five of the eight Type 26s now have steel cut, with HMS Glasgow and HMS Cardiff both fitting out at BAE Systems’ Scotstoun yard. HMS Cardiff, as we reported recently, completed her flood-up at Scotstoun. HMS Belfast, Birmingham and Sheffield are at earlier stages of construction at Govan.
At Babcock’s Rosyth shipyard, four of the five Type 31 Inspiration-class frigates now have steel cut. HMS Venturer, the lead ship, has floated off and is currently fitting out, with HMS Active having also completed her float-off. HMS Formidable is under construction, and steel was cut on HMS Bulldog earlier this year. Keel laying for the fifth ship, HMS Campbeltown, is expected later this year. That puts at least eight frigates currently in build across Scotland simultaneously, a shipbuilding effort not seen in the UK for decades.
Beyond those five Type 26s, HMS Newcastle, Edinburgh and London are still to have their keels laid and assembly to begin, with the programme targeting completion of all eight hulls by the mid-2030s and the build interval between ships reducing from 18 months to 12 months as the programme gathers pace.
With the surface fleet now at five frigates and the Defence Investment Plan still unpublished, the question of how the Royal Navy sustains its commitments in the years before the 13 new hulls arrive remains one of the most pressing in British defence.
Time to give up on any deployments outside of the North Atlantic.
Unfortunately yes for a while. One T45 on operation outside the Atlantic is all that will be available.
It’s even more upsetting when you consider the amount of money wasted on T23 life extensions and the vast sums of money paid by the government for the five batch II rivers that we could have started frigate production earlier.
The government spent in the region of £1.25 billion on the batch II rivers and £1 billion on the Type 23 life extension. It could have used that money to basically order the type 26 frigates in 2014 producing around one a year.
Don’t we have to provide at least one Type 26 to the Norwegian navy by 2030? I think a second batch of Type 31s should be ordered.
Great idea, but it doesn’t help us between now and 2030.
Orders are not the issue, the UK has more large surface combatants under construction than any other country in the world except China. But fleet numbers won’t rise for over half a decade.
Getting all the T45’s back must be the near term priority.
Labour government 97-2010, Tory government 2010-2024.
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No Frigates ordered from 1996 to 2017.
The demise of the RN deserves greater national recognition by the mainstream media, though many in the UK now will have little to no interest.
YET NO RN LEADERSHIP SAID A LOT. NEITHER DID THE CDS ACROSS THAT PERIOD
THEY TOO ARE CULPABLE.
Lord West in 2004 instantly springs to mind, who presided over the decimation of both the Escort force and MCMV force in the cuts labelled as “new Chapter of the SDSR.”
Half the RAFs fighter force went at that time, including the entire Jaguar force and the further salami slicing of the Tornado F3 and Tornado GR4 force.
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I seem to remember a speech by lord Robertson as head of NATO in 1999 chastising the UK and European nations for having too much emphasis on anti submarine warfare, Cold War relics as the term used
Don’t recall that one, Jim.
Which stupid person spent so much refurbishing Iron Duke to now scrap it.
If this vessel is then sold to another Navy to operate serious questions need to be asked of the RN leadership.
I FEEL SURE THERE IS LIFE LEFT IN THE HULL.
WILL OTHERS MORE KNOWLEDGEABLE THAN ME PLEASE COMMENT?
Obviously not, or it wouldn’t be getting withdrawn from service.
No, the hulls are long behind their design lives. The hull of Richmond was found to be literally paper thin leaving her unsafe to sail back to the UK.
An outrage beyond belief! In earlier days we would talk of government as “They ” who generally,sort of knew what they were doing, but this situation is such that it warrants a class action against the people at the head of this debacle. Now the UK is in a national emergency-no less!! I do not believe that the frigate programme cannot be speeded up-it can and MUST be!
What a national disgrace. The once mighty Royal Navy is now reduced to this by successive incompetent governments and a total lack of planning. Yet, the grey suits in the Treasury still keep wielding the axe as and when they can, even as the US shield is slowly drawing away from Europe’s shores. The sad truth is the UK can’t afford to rebuild its forces to defend the realm…sleep tight.
It’s not the treasury axing anything, it’s salt water corrosion. Happens to the best of us.
Jim, an aside issue. I’ve been reading just how impressive the CH2 and AS90’s are on the Ukrainian battlefields. It just demonstrates just how good British-designed and built armour is, even if they are long in the tooth. The UK must attempt to rebuild its own armour manufacturing in an effort to re-establish strong and reliable equipment and learn from the Ajax debacle.
..the Mailonline and even the Telegraph will have a field day!! I’m staying clear!
Don’t look, my friend, I know you like to.
Save yourself the bother.
Voices within the RN warned back in 2012 that the headlong pursuit of two huge carriers would gut the RN.
When asked about not enough money to keep buying new support vessels and escorts, 1Sl of the time opined
‘once we’ve got the carriers, the minister will just have to find the extra money’.
The Minster didn’t, and didn’t – and now we don’t have a navy.
The ministers did find the money, the ships are being built. It was just five years too late. Nothing to do with the carriers and everything to do with George Osbourne looking for a headline and fighting a war in defence of America in the deserts of Asia for twenty years.