The Royal Navy’s future Type 83 destroyer programme remains under review, with no confirmed timeline for its outline business case, after the government today directed a parliamentary question to a January answer that confirmed the programme’s future depends on the Defence Investment Plan.
Liberal Democrat MP James MacCleary asked the Secretary of State for Defence what progress had been made on the Type 83 design process and whether it would be completed by 2038. Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard referred MacCleary to his response to question 106653 answered on 27 January 2026.
That January answer, given in response to a question from Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty asking whether the Type 83 outline business case was on track to be submitted in June 2026, confirmed that “the Type 83 concept is currently under review against the Royal Navy’s Hybrid Navy Strategy” and that “future business case approval remains subject to the Defence Investment Plan.”
Referring a new question back to an existing answer is standard parliamentary practice where the government’s position has not changed, and indicates that the January statement remains the current position: the concept is still under review against the Hybrid Navy Strategy and the outline business case has not yet been submitted, with its timing dependent on the Defence Investment Plan.
The Type 83 is intended to replace the Royal Navy’s six Type 45 destroyers, which entered service between 2009 and 2013 and are expected to serve into the 2040s. The replacement programme has been under development for several years, with the 2038 date referenced in MacCleary’s question representing the timeframe by which design work would need to be sufficiently advanced to allow construction to begin in time for the Type 45s’ out-of-service dates.
The Defence Investment Plan, on which the Type 83 business case approval depends alongside a number of other major programmes, was originally expected last autumn. No publication date has been announced.
If the Treasury have screwed over Defence, I’d keep a weather eye out for the DIP on Friday, the 8th, the day after the election. A splendid day to bury bad news. The news cycle will be dominated by the election results, flowing straight into the weekend. By the Monday it’ll be a damp squib.
Don’t you mean when not if.
Sounds about right.
What if the DIP was published on Friday and it totally overshadowed all the elections? What if the media only wanted to talk about the DIP, and ignored all the political election trivia? What if?
🤣
Theres a purdah in effect, the government isnt supposed to announce anything that would unduly influence the election
My only view on this is how can you have planned out of service dates if you don’t have a timeline on when there going to be replaced, or you don’t need the ships they’re replacing, in which case why are you even thinking about replacing them. Bit like saying I’m throw all my clothes away this year but I have no idea when I’m going to replace them, I don’t think the local supermarket will appreciate me wandering in with no clothes on.
Because the type 45 has a lifespan of 25 to 30 years, and poor planning by the government. This is why is some areas we have capability gaps.
25-30 years? They’ll all be run out to 40 years
Well if they never leave the pier
That is what happened with carrier force. Invincible class and Harrier got retired, and there was a void until QE and F35. Still paying the price of that hiatus. Italians went directly from Harrier to F-35 so it was possible.
“wandering in with no clothes on”
A word perfect matephor for the current UK defence posture, and what it would be like for us to participate in a peer to peer war.
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BAE aren’t stupid – they know HMG isn’t going to fund T83 and keep an AAW T26 variant on the far back burner just in case
BAE’s T83 is just a modified T26. It’s not ‘on the back burner’, it’s quite literally what is being offered.
Ignore that T83 PowerPoint fantasy ship – it doesn’t exist.
We’ll get a AAW variant T26, better iteration on the Artisan radar, forget that CEFAR2 fantasy, drop the mission bay, add some VLS stuffed full of short Mk41 Exls and CAMM – put long range arrows in the forward Mk41 battery – a ‘good enough’ AAW frigate.
We ain’t getting no 96 cell Death Star shooting down light AAW cruisers or robotic drone missile ships – they are PowerPoint fantasies to amuse the Admirals at Tracey Island
CEAFAR2 was never a credible option. There’s no way in hell the MoD will import a more expensive, foreign system, with less capability, and most importantly, no British industrial benefits.
It’s good, then, that the BAE designs never included CEAFAR2, did they – they used a development of Artisan (specifically the Next Generation Transmit/Receive Module), as you seem to suggest already.
Again, the mission bay is no longer present. It’s been replaced by a secondary VLS.
We already have 72-cell destroyers. Not quite sure why you think our replacement would be a step down.
But anyhow, basically, your examples are all things already included in BAE’s proposal, or being developed already globally. Once again, demonstrating your misunderstanding.
Leg,
Ceafar is a very credible option, in fact, all current indicators suggest that a partnership is extremely likely. In the world of defence procurement, this collaboration is currently sitting in the category of a foregone conclusion rather than mere speculation. Official concept art for the Future Air Dominance System consistently features a mast design that is a near-perfect match for the CEAFAR active electronically scanned array produced in Australia. This alignment makes perfect sense given the trilateral AUKUS security pact, which has significantly increased technology sharing and the desire for hardware standardisation across the British and Australian fleets.
Since BAE Systems is already the prime contractor for the Australian Hunter-class frigate which utilises the CEAFAR 2 system, porting that proven technology over to the Type 83 represents a logical and cost-effective path forward. The Type 83 is intended to be a formidable platform focused on ballistic missile defence and managing hypersonic threats, which requires the high-power, fixed-panel digital arrays that CEA specialises in. Because the United Kingdom does not currently produce a comparable domestic fixed-panel AESA radar of this specific scale, partnering with CEA allows the MoD to bypass a multi-billion pound development cycle that would take years to mature.
The program is currently in its assessment phase with a formal business case expected later in 2026, and while BAE Systems has not yet officially named CEA as the final partner, the engineering integration in their marketing materials makes it the industry’s worst-kept secret. High-level meetings between the two nations have already explicitly mentioned evaluating this technology for the British programme. Unless there is a sudden shift toward a purely sovereign British-made alternative or a major budgetary pivot that scales back the ship’s requirements, the BAE and CEA collaboration remains the frontrunner for providing the Royal Navy’s next-generation sensor suite.
Sorry Leh … fn spell checker!
“We’ll get a AAW variant T26, better iteration on the Artisan radar”
You can not get an high end AAW ship with just Artisan.
Since UK lost the high end naval radar know how, that makes CEAFAR a viable alternative if it is good as Australians say and BAE would not be unhappy since gives an edge to the T26 variant. Other options are Thales(French and Dutch branches), Leonardo – but i am not seeing Royal Navy with Italian radars regardless of how god they are.
AlexS
You’re right, to be a “High-End AAW ship”, one that can protect an entire Carrier Strike Group from a coordinated swarm of missiles, you need more eyes, more power and no blinking … that’s why the UK is looking at CEAFAR for the Type 83. Artisan is a great workhorse, but for the big fights, you need a thoroughbred.
The Uk hasn’t lost its “know how”, the Sampson radar on the Type 45 is still widely considered one of the most capable air-defense radars in the world. It isn’t “low-end” because it rotates; it rotates because that architecture allowed the UK to place the radar much higher on the mast, improving the radar horizon without making the ship top-heavy.
UK “know how” created ECRS Mk2. Leonardo UK and BAE are currently making the ECRS Mk2 for the Typhoon, ECRS Mk2 is arguably the most advanced fighter radar in the world as of 2026, featuring a multi-functional array capable of both high-end tracking and high-power electronic attack (jamming). The “know-how” clearly exists in the UK. The issue is simply that the UK hasn’t funded a navalized, large-scale fixed-panel version of that technology, choosing instead to focus its R&D budget on the air domain and the future Type 83.
However, you are correct that the Royal Navy currently lacks a domestic fixed-panel AESA ready for the Type 83. If the UK wanted a 100% British fixed-panel radar today, they couldn’t just pull one off a shelf, they would have to wait 10 years for it to be designed and tested. In that specific context, the industrial capacity is missing, even if the scientific know-how is not. The bottom line is that while BAE’s radars; Sampson/S1850M are probably still the world leaders in raw distance, CEAFAR-L is the world leader in digital persistence. For a ship to survive a 2026-era drone and hypersonic swarm, ‘Persistence’ is becoming more important than ‘Distance.’
The 4 to 5 second delay on rotating radars is why digital is the buzzword of the 2020s. In naval combat, that gap is called ‘Latency,’ and against a missile moving at Mach 3, it is an eternity. Through the magic of digital beamforming, a digital radar like CEAFAR-L doesn’t work like a flashlight; it works more like a high-speed processor that can multitask.
It not just the Australians ‘hyping’ CEAFAR, US/UK/Asian and European govs/ ‘primes’ also give it excellent reports.
The Hunter-class uses an integrated mast with over 6,000 digital ‘eyes’ elements. Because it’s fully digital, it can split these elements into independent beams, staring at a suspicious target at extreme range while simultaneously maintaining a 360° broad search without any ‘blind time.'”because it is fully digital, the computer can tell 200 tiles to stare at that suspicious object at 450km while the other 800 tiles continue to scan the rest of the sky. As a result, you get a high-powered, concentrated beam on the target; the ‘stare’, while the rest of the radar continues its broad sight search. The broad sight/view might become 20% less powerful for a fraction of a second, but it never stops.
Radars don’t actually send out a continuous stream of energy; they send pulses. A digital radar (Ceafar) can send Pulse A to the North, Pulse B to the South, and Pulse C at the suspicious target, all within microseconds. To the human eye or a computer screen, it looks like the radar is doing everything at once. It ‘stares’ by interleaving extra pulses into that one specific spot without skipping its chores in the other directions.
Unlike the BAE S1850M or Sampson, which are powerful but mostly produce one or two big main beams at a time, a digital AESA can form dozens of independent beams simultaneously. One beam is doing a volume search (broad sight), one beam is ‘staring’ at a horizon contact, another beam is tracking a friendly helicopter.
Because the Hunter-class has six faces in its hexagon mast, the faces can hand off tasks. If the North face is busy staring, the North-East and North-West faces can slightly tilt their digital beams to cover any potential gaps.
The ‘stare’ is a power move, when the radar ‘stares,’ it isn’t just looking harder; it’s gathering more data points. You get 100 pings in a tenth of a second. The radar can average those pings to filter out the noise and realize … That’s not a cloud, that’s a missile. With analog/rotating, you get one ping every 4/5 seconds, if that ping is fuzzy due to jamming or weather, you have to wait another 4/5 seconds to try again.
Precisely this, T83 will use T26 as its starting point.
We have to make sure we don’t try to order some sort of gold plated 12,000 ton cruiser, thats going to be way too much money.
Zero% chance of this ship arriving by 2038. The Type 45 took 12 years from start of development to initial service, 2038 is 12 years away and nothing is decided.
The first T45 took 3 years to build the main structure. How long did the first Type 26 take?
I rest my case. Very sad.
The pip fissco has resultred in under use with plenty of residual hull fstigue life remaining. Current upgrades and enhancements to type 45s will result in a credible AAW capability for next 15 years. Replacement work needs to commence and any mention of a capability gap banished to the criminally negligent corner. …but there is time especially with the factory manufacturing concepts now well embeded.
Thinking it through, the successor to T45 will be built by BAE, it is the only warship yard with sufficient expertise. But BAE is going to be very busy building T26 for the next dozen years. Could they build T83s at the same time as T26s, utilising the extended facilities of the JHH? Possibly, if the T26 programme runs like clockwork, the ship turns out to be trouble-free, it gets the right radar weapons and sensors at the outset, without needing endless upgrades and refits and they overcome the skills deficit legacy. Etc.
But the real determinants here are two-fold. One, the RN cannot afford to build T26 and T83 at the same time. Its surface vessel budget at best (1) is £2.4 bn a year. It is said that only about 30% of that is available for new-build ships, the rest goes on mid-life refits, contracted-out maintenance and so on. If you only have £800m a year to spend and that has to cover warships, minor warships and RFA vessels, it is obvious that you can’t build two £1bn+ warships a year, the cost is going to have to be spread over several years and build rate slowed down to fit the budget.(As is likely the case with the T26/T31 at the moment). So basically, building T26 and T83 at the same time would give no advantage to RN, contractor or MOD.
Therefore, best to finish the T26 build first, before embarking on T83. (To avoid delay and give Babcock some work after the T31, could some of the later T26 construction work be sub-contracted to Babcock? – HMG cannot afford to be the only provider of work to the yards, they need to co-operate when one had work and the other doesn’t).
The second determinant may well lie in this concept of an optimally-manned/unmanned T91 armaments ship. It was presented as a way to carry spare missiles and armaments for the air defence destroyer, which sounded sensible enough. But it would not be too surprising if somewhere deep in the bowels of the MOD, thoughts were turning to: if this little armaments ship can carry the missiles, why can’t it fire them? And if it can, wouldn’t two or three little ships be cheaper and quicker to build than an 8,000 tonne destroyer? Is that too far-fetched?
(1) The RN submitted a big estimate for its 2023 budget, up from IIRC £1.8 bn a year to £2.4 bn. That was however not agrees by the NAO and no revised figures have been published since.
Some of the T26 programme costs are covered by the Norwegians, so we could afford to produce both. However, unless something changes at the heart of government, we won’t. There will be less pressure from Govan, and I’m not sure that would be wrong.
A proper plan to extend the lives of the T45s for 8 years and the first T83 appearing in 2043 would be a reasonable compromise, assuming the first batch of T31s could also be upgraded to AAW to cover the Lifex transition. There are already plans for Mk41 on T31 and experiments to put Asters in Mk41. The addition of a second, high quality radar for distance would allow T31 to function as a competant second-tier AAW. That’s not a trivial piece of work for a capability insert, but doable by 2035.
The Iver Huitfeldt-class ships have the SMART-L radar above their hangar, which is itself related to the S1850M radar used on the T45 and carriers, so fitting a second radar is not beyond the realms of possibility. Alternatively, Thales offers a more powerful version of the NS110 radar used on the T31, called the NS200. It wouldn’t be as big of a boost in capabilities, but it’s still an improvement.
Rather than asking pointless questions where the answer is always going to be waiting the DIP. How about someone ask when specifically it will be published and if unknown what specifically is holding it up.
I’m starting to think a brand new class of at least 12 Type 45’s with all the upgrades incorporated & Dragonfire will be the easiest route. We’ll need a brand new construction yard or an expansion of a current one but it will save years faffing about with concepts and design work.
12 AAW ships might be a bit too much to ask and the T45 silo capacity is limited compared to current T83 proposals. There’s probably a lot of background work done already with the T83 so don’t want to waste all that. Lots of destraction with all these drone-type ships happening at the same time.
‘A lot of background work’. – trust me, a couple of postage stamps would be plenty.
It’s still a PowerPoint fantasy at Tracey Island
You’re probably right regarding the 12 ships unfortunately and perhaps there is a fairly mature T83 design in the shadows, but we do need more AAW fast and I’m not really a fan of an AAW T26 or 31. Perhaps even build a small number of new T45’s and when T83 is ready transition to building them. All depends on DiP as usual.
T45 is a decades old design and its engines no longer exist – they were such a disaster, RR shredded everything and pretend they never happened.
You’d basically be tooling up to build new Ford Mondeo’s
So, new T45’s, the same but 100% different?
And Dragonfire? It’s not like the phasers in Star Trek – it can burn down a small drone in @30 seconds, not blast Klingon Battlecruisers
Why not? Works for the yanks with their Arleigh Burkes
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We should just hand the whole thing over to Japan. We’d get a working ship at half the price.