Efforts to recreate the UK’s complex warship manufacturing capability outside Scotland would face major structural and skills barriers, industry representatives have told MPs, underlining the strategic importance of shipbuilding centres on the Clyde and at Rosyth.
During evidence to the Scottish Affairs Committee, Andrew Kinniburgh, Director-General of Make UK Defence, said that relocating or duplicating the industrial capacity that supports complex warship construction would be exceptionally difficult. Asked whether a future government could realistically build equivalent capability elsewhere in the UK, he replied: “Absolutely huge, a huge mountain to climb to recreate that.”
Kinniburgh stressed that Scotland’s shipbuilding strength rests not only on physical infrastructure but on deeply embedded skills, supply chains and long-running programmes. He noted that complex warships are assembled from large numbers of specialised subsystems, making concentration of expertise a decisive factor in efficiency and delivery. “The nature of a big warship is a series of relatively small subsystems that all come together into one great big warship,” he said.
MPs also raised concerns that the economic benefits of shipbuilding remain heavily concentrated in the central belt, with limited visibility of small and medium-sized enterprises outside those hubs. Dave Doogan MP argued that while Clyde and Rosyth shipyards were a strategic asset, more needed to be done to ensure that defence spending generated wider regional impact across Scotland.
In response, Kinniburgh pointed to Barrow-in-Furness as a potential model for strengthening SME participation around a major shipbuilding programme. He said the success of the submarine enterprise there was rooted in close coordination between local authorities, education providers and prime contractors. “The local council, the college, the university and BAE Systems have all come together,” he said, adding that such alignment had helped support SME engagement despite geographic and workforce challenges.
However, he cautioned that replicating this approach was not straightforward and required sustained investment and long-term planning. Remote locations, competition for skilled labour and pressure on housing and local services all shaped industrial outcomes. “It’s a hard place to operate,” he said, “and you’re in a real race to bring talented young people in and hang on to them.”
TBH this is a load of nonsense.
Handwringing at its best.
The suppliers will still supply components and most of the bits are palletised so can be moved North -> South overnight as needs be.
The bigger issue is persuading the workforce to move en mass. That is down to generous relocation and wages plus incentives. Some will take it – others won’t.
You could run the exact same argument around H&W Belfast as there is only a core group of people there. The mass is trained from scratch.
If it is essential to make it work you figure out what you need to pay to make it happen – it is called reverse engineering.
You think you can rapidly build a 20,000 ship lift and 6 acre hall like they have at Barrow
Have I missed something in terms of long term funded commitments that’s going to require the UK having additional ship building capacity in the long term?
With a £28bn black hole in funding and T32 effectively frozen before it was even drawn up I’m struggling to see what these additional yards are supposed to do.
Or are we aiming for build 13 ships fast then have a decade of no work and play yank the chain all over.
There’s something of a fragile plan emerging right now, if we can commit to producing a new ship every 12-18 months with a 25 year life that gives 20 surface combatants.
Separate to that a new submarine every 24 months gives 12 with a 25 year life.
We just have to get that going consistently and I would argue stop producing handfuls or a single type and try and get a solid production run out based around common hull / propulsion.
If we get export orders from there on you can think about additional yard capacity but right now the focus has to be on getting the present yards assured of work with funding commitments over 25 year time scales.
Regarding relocation terms, given the SNP’s hatred of industry or success, I think a large part of the existing workforce would move anyway. No jobs, high tax and no hope drives movement.
Oh and I was born in South West Scotland but raised in Derby where my entire family relocated to in the early 60’s due to the above reasons. One big Pickfords Lorry and 23 people on buses and trains. No relocation package, just hard work, guts and RR, International Combustion and The BR Carriage and Wagon Works ! k
Kilted Ram and proud of it.
My great grandfather certainly did in the 1880s from the Clyde to the Tyne and then to the Thames as a shipwright, indeed East London was full of Scottish and Northern English workers who moved, be it in general engineering, aviation, electronics, shipbuilding to Jam making. No idea how that reflects on modern times mind though I suspect many Scottish skilled workers would move south if ship building was closing down there, many of those skills would not be easily transferable in the region, but always thought it would be a big, multi decade and very expensive process if military ship building was relocated away from Scotland with inevitable effects on delivery so best to get as many ships into the water over the next ‘safe’ decade.
I agree SB,
I have been wondering / dreaming 🙂 about creating a new shipyard in the North East of England and how would that be done. Re-creating the skilled workforce and the support network for those people is the biggest challenge. Rather than say,”Ooo it’s all too hard, too expensive,” which is our usual response we should develop a plan and get on with it now.
Despite what everyone says I do not think the RN / RFA are going to be anyway large enough to defend us if we end up in a scrap anytime soon i.e. in the next 10 years, which increasingly and frighteningly likely the way things are going! We are simply incapable of building a sufficiently large enough fleet in the likely timeframes given current infrastructure capacity. If was does breakout (god forbid) just having two yards building complex warships will be far too little and far too vulnerable. I am probably talking in terms of the unrealistic, but I do believe that we need to significantly increase fleet size quickly and that will mean more shipyard capacity way beyond what is possible on the current yards even if they are expanded. Another major shipyard turning out complex warships, one designed and built for 21st century production techniques from the get go is needed. Need is the operative word in my mind.
We, Europe, need a huge increase in capacity given China is building another 4 or 5 super shipyards if I remember Jonathan’s recent post correctly. They already have more capacity then the west as I understand it! That fact alone should be scaring the hell out of Admirals and politicians across Europe and western aligned countries the world over because China has repeatedly stated that they want to avenge the 200 years of shame as they it and as I have reminded people before, the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion put us firmly in their sights even though those events happened during Queen Victoria’s reign! Those huge Chinese shipyards will give them the industrial capability to out build any other navy or potentially any group of navies on the planet making China by far the dominate naval power on the planet in the very near future.
We need to stop thinking stuff is too hard, especially when it undermines our ability defend ourselves. We need more shipyards, because we are going to need a much bigger navy. Even if we do get plenty of drones I think we will need surface ships to act as command ships for the drone forces. Russia demonstrated an effective Anti-SATellite (ASAT) weapon just before they invaded Ukraine. They destroyed one of their own satellites with a missile which many said could and might still cause a cascade effect in low earth orbit denying satellite communications using current low earth orbit internet satellites. OK the geostationary satellites will not be affected directly but we will be unable to replace them once they reach the end of their lives or otherwise fail all of which means shore based satellite enabled control of drones will not be possible accept in coastal waters. Hence a bigger fleet will be necessary even for a drone enabled navy, as I believe that Russia has decided that it’s adversaries need space assets more than they do so they will use ASAT’s if they think it will deny their enemies a significant advantage.
All of which takes us back to the need for way more shipbuilding capacity in the west. It is the one area where the UK have made a truly promising start so re-enforce strength and double down on the National Shipbuilding Strategy and build another big shipyard in the North East, for example, as well as expanding the existing yards to the maximum capacity that they can achieve. The North East is a region that needs more investment and Sunderland docks look rather under utilised at the moment so a possibility(?). I am sure there are other opportunities to build new or refurbish existing assets as well.
I will now sit back and await the nay sayers to shoot me down 🙂
Cheers CR
You’re in fantasy land if you think you can easily move two shipyards and two naval dockyards anywhere else in the country. You only have to look at the evolving cluster f**k that is the US ship building industry or our own trials in Barrow to realise that throwing money at ship building will do very little for you.
Only a multi decade process will generate ship building of complex warships.
Cammell Laird used to build warships. AFAIK they are still in business and contributing some modules to T26.
Is there any reason why they are not building complete warship hulls anymore?
Modular ship building is quicker. By building in parallel you cut time taken
Yes their owners decided to get out of the shipbuilding industry after the Attenborough was launched, for shipbuilding it’s very cramped for space as a lot of the land has been redeveloped and it’s very busy refitting etc. It’s far better building modules to be assembled elsewhere, same for Appledore and A&P.
They bid for the T31 program and lost, they bid for the FSS program and lost. That’s why C&L is not building warships.
Babcock and BAE build warships, C&L doesn’t.
Much the same reason Aston Martin doesn’t make Trucks.
Yes it would be difficult, yes it would be a Mountain to climb but this is an answer given by someone who is deeply imbedded in the UK MIC to a bunch of Politicians and as we all know UK Politicians don’t tend to have any background in Manufacturing, engineering or even Science (Mrs T was an exception).
The fact is that yes it can be done and with the right management structure it’s not actually that hard, the key bit is to pick a location with the right key attributes.
So you need a site with excellent access to deep water (near the sea), physical growth potential (land), a nearby population centre (recruitment). preferably some existing infrastructure (docks, quays and transport) and probably most important of all the core of a workforce with some transferable but related skills.
I’m going to completely ignore the bit about the supply chain as it’s just irrelevant as the supply chains for Barrow, Rosyth and Clyde are scattered all over the place and it’s pretty well the same in every other country.
So to prove my argument that it can be done and not break the Bank let’s just consider Babcock at Rosyth, no ship of any description had been built there from scratch. But they had all the above listed attributes and what’s more they completely skipped the established RN/BAe supply chain to cut costs by using a lot of COTS equipment.
Anyone who has been following the progress of the T31 (or read any of my earlier comments) will know it wasn’t easy and a lot of us were rather sceptical about Babcock pulling it off, but it’s all starting to look rather hopeful.🤞🏻
So if some Political Earthquake were to happen (SNP gets its way), what could happen ?
Let’s think about the possible sites that could be suitable for Naval Shipbuilding outside of Scotland.
1. Belfast is already going through this process of regeneration so a pretty good candidate for future 20k+ warships. It has nearly all of the attributes needed except a workforce and that’s being worked on.
2. CL at Birkenhead, IMHO its biggest issues are the availability of land for new construction and it’s already pretty busy on refit work.
3. Appledore, yep it’s lovely and ok for building smaller ships and blocks but how expandable is the workforce and with the best will in the world fitting out on mud is just “so 19th century”.
4. Falmouth it has the lot except land to expand on and getting round that is geographically very difficult (very expensive) to rectify (I’ve visited it and it’s pretty impressive to see how it’s all shoehorned in). Besides which when they did the relocation exercise in 2014 it was identified as one of the 2 best alternative location for the SSBNs to be based in the UK (Milford Haven was the other but someone pointed out that Tankers and Subs don’t mix well).
5. Devonport, it’s built ships before including light Fleet Carriers. It’s got everything attribute wise and let’s face it you do not need 2 massive RN Bases on the South Coast anymore (which does seem to be way HMG / MOD / RN thinking is heading anyway). The North yard is full of stored SSN’s but that number will decline once the decommissioning process gets into its swing and that will free up some space. But meanwhile the South yard is just sat there waiting to be rejuvenated. 🤔
B
Ones I have excluded.
1. Portsmouth it has all the attributes including a history of shipbuilding but it’s the only HMNB that can dock the QE’s and they do take up a hell of a lot of space. And as the T26 and T31 will be based there it’s going to be busy and space wise it’s now getting a bit limited.
2. The former Swan Hunter Yard, the land is still there but nothing else, and the debacle over the Bay class hangs over its head like the Sword of Damocles. But yes if it included A&P in the mix, shipbuilding on the Tyne could be regenerated but it would be a a very large task and very expensive. IMHO an option would be to get one of the Japanese shipbuilders to run it as they just seem to have a knack of handling UK industry’s (single Union agreements, closed shop and everyone eats in the same canteen. See Nissan and Toyota for details).
Hi Rodney,
According to the DE&S website the T26 will be based in Devonport so perhaps thinking around closing or running the base down is changing. I certinaly whop so as I believe we need a much bigger navy and 13 frigates just ain’t going to cut it.
I would also like to suggest Sunderland as a possible site for a new shipyard. The docks looked very under utilised last time I looked, although I am aware that there where efforts to redevelop, but they fell fowl of COVID. Not sure if they have been restarted, but they could probably be over ridden if someone decided that the need to urgent enough, which I believe is a point that was reach 10 years ago..! (Allowing for the time it takes to regenerate an entire industry.)
Cheers CR
Hi ABC, I don’t disagree that it can’t be done given enough money and time. However the Rosyth analogy is not a realistic case. Rosyth is an existing active facility that had just spent the last ten years building two aircraft carriers. Rosyth is also a 45 minute drive from Glasgow. Trained ship workers can and did commute between BAE yards and Rosyth under aircraft carrier alliance and Babcock was able to capture a fair bit of the workforce. That’s pretty different from shifting shipbuilding from Glasgow to Liverpool.
Very few people in the UK are mobile, most people in the ship building industry willing to move get snapped up to places like Australia, Singapore or Dubai working in offshore oil and gas projects.