Graeme Downie, the MP for Dunfermline and Dollar, has welcomed the Defence Investment Plan’s commitment to a new Common Combat Vessel and pressed for it to be based on the Type 31 frigate and built at Rosyth, where Babcock assembles the class.
The member of parliament for Dunfermline and Dollar has welcomed the Defence Investment Plan and pressed for the new Common Combat Vessel it commits to building to be based on the Type 31 frigate and assembled at Rosyth, in a statement issued after the plan was published.
Graeme Downie, whose constituency takes in the Fife dockyard, said the commitment to the new vessel had the potential to bring millions of pounds of investment into the area and to secure highly skilled jobs, and he argued that the ship should draw on the Type 31 design already in build at Rosyth. “There is no time for delay,” he said, urging ministers to begin work as soon as possible and saying he would keep making the case for the yard.
The Common Combat Vessel is one of the central elements of the surface fleet the plan sets out, a new class of at least six warships intended to take on the air-defence role as the Type 45 destroyers retire from the mid-2030s and to act as a hub for the uncrewed systems at the heart of the Navy’s planned hybrid fleet, with the first ships expected in the early 2030s. The plan does not yet say which design the vessels will follow or where they will be built, which is the gap that Mr Downie and others are pressing to fill.
His case rests on the work already under way in Fife, where Babcock is assembling the Royal Navy’s five Type 31 general-purpose frigates, the first of them HMS Venturer due to begin sea trials with the others following down the line at Rosyth, a programme that has drawn substantial investment into the yard and its workforce. The Type 31, based on a proven Danish hull and adapted for the Navy by Babcock, has also found export buyers in Poland and Indonesia, and the company has separately set out a version of the ship configured to command a force of autonomous vessels, the kind of role the Common Combat Vessel is meant to perform.
Mr Downie pointed to the record of the Rosyth workforce as the reason the yard was well placed to take on the work, saying the people there had “delivered time and again” in building warships, and he set the investment against a darker security backdrop, arguing that the country was living in more dangerous times and had to act like the frontline nation it was. He said Fife had a proud defence heritage with the dockyard at its centre, and also pointed out that the plan came on top of five million pounds of government funding he said he had secured the previous week for an innovation centre at Rosyth.
The plan today sets out the requirement for the new vessels without resolving where they will be built, a decision that carries real weight for Rosyth, where the Type 31 production line will in time run down and the yard will need fresh orders to keep its workforce in place.
The first question I have is, what will replace the Type 45 in the air defence role, that is, protecting the Carriers when on deployment? Will that task now fall to Type 91 autonomous arsenal ship and type 94 unmanned radar picket?
It’ll fall to the CCV and the accompanying drones. The Common Combat Vessel is manned.
I’d like to know its capabilities, but we aren’t even at the concept stage yet are we?
I have ominous feeling about this programme. An T26 AAW variant was the sensible, achievable and low risk approach that used a “hot” production line. But the £1 bn a ship price tag (£5.9 total) just made too juicy a target for the bean counters. Instead £1.1bn will be spent over the next four year on a high risk solution that will probably cost far more than £5.9bn in the end, if it isn’t cancelled then in 20230. As for the CCV, Arrowhead 120 is more likely to be the baseline design than the larger T31. At the end of the day it will be a floating computer and comms centre with 24×7 hotel facilities for the operators more important than weapons. Self defence systems and aviation facilities for UAVs seems all we can expect. The decision to start decommissioning the T45’s from 2035 is also crazy when they can be economically life extended for at least a decade. But it means money can be saved by cancelling refits and upgrades from c.2030, and they will probably have a decent resale value given their limited active service.