Navy’s new hybrid warship could be built at Rosyth

The Royal Navy’s planned Common Combat Vessel could be built in the same type of production facility as the Type 31 frigate, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard has told MPs, in the strongest hint yet about where the new hybrid warship might be constructed.

Giving evidence to a joint session of the Treasury and Defence Committees on 8 July, Pollard set out how the government has approached sequencing work across the shipbuilding sector after settling on what he called the steady drumbeat option.

“When we look at Type 31s, due to the faster rate of production of the 31 compared to a 26, we’re now looking at what follows on from that order, and although we’re not yet precisely in a position to determine the whole shape for the Common Combat Vessel, the Common Combat Vessel could broadly perhaps be in a similar type of production facility as the one we see with 31s,” the minister said, adding: “What we are keen to do is keep ship production in Rosyth and in the Clyde going.”

‘What follows on’ from the Type 31 order

The Type 31s are built by Babcock at Rosyth, and the structure of Pollard’s answer points the follow-on question squarely at the Fife yard, since the contrast given by his remarks at the session was his own: the Norwegian order means Clyde production on the Type 26 is now projected fifteen years ahead, while it is the faster-producing Type 31 line, on the other side of Scotland, for which the government is looking at what comes next, with the Common Combat Vessel raised in precisely that context.

Babcock has promoted concepts derived from its Arrowhead 140 design for future ‘command vesselx requirements, and the comments sharpen the written answer Pollard gave the same week, in which he said options for the vessel’s hull form are being explored. They bear directly on the industrial timing question, since the five-ship Type 31 order completes in the coming years and the yard’s follow-on steelwork demand depends heavily on Denmark’s pending frigate decision, a dependency the Scottish Labour MSP Paul Sweeney highlighted to the UK Defence Journal this week in warning that core surface shipbuilding sites need a sustained drumbeat to avoid a return to boom and bust.

The Defence Investment Plan commits to six Common Combat Vessels as the Royal Navy’s first hybrid warships, coordinating uncrewed systems in the air, on the surface and under water, with their arrival intended to align with the retirement of the Type 45 destroyers from the mid-2030s.

On the Clyde, Pollard said the Norwegian Type 26 export win means the government can now project shipbuilding on the class “for an extra fifteen years” and that, it’s safe to say, sharpens the Rosyth reading, because with the Clyde’s production line secured into the 2040s by the frigates being built for the Royal Navy and Norway, the minister’s stated aim of keeping both yards going leaves the Common Combat Vessel as the programme most naturally positioned to sustain Rosyth once the faster Type 31 line completes.

The continuation of the Fleet Solid Support ships for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and the agreement with the Netherlands on new Amphibious Transport Ships, which he described as “effectively an export campaign win” since the UK will build them for the Dutch as well, will sustain other yards, and further work could spread wider still, with the minister saying the government “will continue to support shipbuilding in a number of other yards as well, and, to a certain extent I can’t say which yards yet because that hasn’t been procured, but that could be across a number of our new shipbuilding projects, that could be block builds.”

Do note though readers that no procurement decision on the Common Combat Vessel has been announced, and the minister’s evidence stopped short of committing the ship to any yard, with the same session also hearing that certain vessel classes in the plan will be bought jointly with Norway under the offset arrangements attached to the Type 26 export deal.