The Government will publish a new Shipbuilding and Maritime Technology Action Plan later this year as the Royal Navy manages the retirement of its Type 23 frigates and the arrival of new Type 26 and Type 31 ships.
The commitment was set out in a written parliamentary answer to Labour MP Luke Akehurst, who asked how Defence was assessing the long-term sustainability of Britain’s naval shipbuilding capacity once programmes funded through the Defence Investment Plan are completed.
Defence Readiness and Industry Minister Luke Pollard said the National Shipbuilding Office, now part of the National Armaments Director Group, was continuing to assess the workforce, infrastructure and industrial capacity required to sustain the sector.
He said: “The Government assesses the long-term sustainability, capability and capacity of UK naval shipbuilding through the ongoing work of the National Shipbuilding Office (NSO), as part of the National Armaments Director Group, and the Royal Navy.”
Pollard added: “The Defence Investment Plan provides a significant forward programme of naval procurement, and the NSO, RN and wider NADG will continue to work closely with industry to understand future workforce, capacity and infrastructure requirements in the immediate and long term.”
The forthcoming action plan is intended to set out the Government’s approach to maintaining and expanding the shipbuilding sector beyond the current programme of frigates, support ships and future autonomous vessels.
Pollard said: “The NSO will publish a Shipbuilding and Maritime Technology Action Plan later this year which will detail this government’s approach to ensuring the long-term growth and sustainability of the UK Shipbuilding sector.”
Frigate transition
Separate questions from Akehurst focused on the risk of escort numbers falling as Type 23 frigates leave service before their Type 26 and Type 31 replacements arrive. In both cases, Pollard referred back to a July parliamentary answer setting out the transition plan.
Pollard said in July: “The Government is investing in: new autonomous surface vessels; autonomous sub-surface; an amphibious fleet with the Netherlands; future Common Combat Vessels; and delivering a combined force of 13 Type 26 frigates with Norway expected to enter service from the late 2020s; five Type 31 frigates expected to be in service by the early 2030s; and new Fleet Solid Support ships.”
The combined Type 26 figure includes the UK and Norway, rather than 13 British frigates alone. On the question of maintaining enough escorts during the changeover, Pollard’s earlier answer said the Navy would not normally publish individual ship retirement or service-entry dates because doing so could reveal elements of the fleet’s longer-term schedule. He added: “However, the Royal Navy continues to ensure that it has sufficient assets available to deliver operational outputs.”
Put simply, we need to order more ships and train/retain more sailors. Anything else coming from the government is just white noise.
Hi Andrew
If they don’t start putting some proper planning and funded concept work into place soon for the CCV there will be a gap in demand at Rosyth, unless Babcock can land an order from Denmark. My guess is the HMG is keeping it’s fingers cross for the Danish order while is faffs about ‘discussing’ the CCV.
The RN’s escort fleet will still be too small even when (if) we get back up to 19 frigates and destroyers. If we do end up in some kind of conflict with Russia there has to be a real risk of it escalating and that escalation will likely focus on NATO’s week points and the UK maritime environment has got to be high on the target list given state of the RN (and most other NATO navies to be fair).
We need a bigger navy, a much bigger navy and drones alone will not cut it. Given the 20:40:40 crewed ships to reusable to consumable drones the escort fleet size will have a limiting factor on the number of drones, both reusable and consumable, that can realistically be deployed in a controllable manner.
So the RN should consider ordering another 3 or so T31, given BAE Systems yards on the Clyde will be busy for the next 10 years or so with T26. We also need more people across the board…
Cheers CR
Ordering 3 more T31 would make a lot of sense. If the RN end up not keeping them we could offer New Zealand Venturer, Active and even maybe Formidable at a price they couldn’t turn down. Building in anticipation of being able to sell is the way the French have done things.
If we are going to give 3 type 31s away then they’d be better off ordering a whole batch of 6 type 31s. The fact is with the Norwegian purchase of type 26, the RN won’t get upto its intended 26 or more escort warships until 2040 at this rate. More type 31s are most definitely needed.
If we did what you suggest, and order 6 more T31, we would be in a stronger position to get orders from Denmark and NZ because we could offer shorter delivery times by sacrificing build slots. At the moment, as CR hints, we are playing poker and bluffing with Denmark. We should raise the stakes.
I suspect Denmark & NZ won’t consider ordering anything from Babcock until they actually manage to deliver a working ship. But it’s fortunate that both countries have existing ships that have plenty of life left so it’s not terribly time critical.
Indeed. Not that I’m a cynic but you could almost believe that the RN or MOD wanted to delay finishing the T31s.
I think the delays are more likely with Babcock’s delivery. It’s a fixed price contract, so there is nothing for MOD/treasury or the contractor to gain by stringing it out.
Would not be suprised if a Stop gap order for OpV replacement turns up..!
That’s hot the nail on the head, more noise about autonomous vessels and ambition until it comes to ordering them and put your money where your mouth is. The way they say up to 12 subs, this includes 1, 2, 3… 12 and is meaningless, they could say up to 100 I’d they wanted.
It still feels to me that after the type 26, destroyers will be needed and then start a new type of frigate – whatever that will look like at that time.
The type 83 is dead and gone. Government have admitted they can’t afford a high end BMD capable destroyer, after the type 45s leave service. Although the type 45s haven’t been stressed and must be in good material state and therefore capable of serving into the late 2040s or 2050 with upgrades.
If, as seems likely, we have another financial crash tens of billions of £s will suddenly be available for bailouts. Finding a few billion for a handful of ships is a problem of imagination and overcoming dogma. The real problem would come with year on year costs of personnel and maintenance.
If the French can build a perfectly sensible, primarily AAW frigate for £5/600 million, we should be able do the same. This uav nonsense is going to end with the R.N.having a totally unproven system., that is if they get it at all.
Yep, sensible frigates are the way to go.
The only way in my opiniion. If we are building a vessel with the radar and AAW missile why waste money on the drone vessels. It makes no sense. Just increase the number of silo’s. as the French intened to do.
Yep and that means T31. Three more T31 would allow us to.pull.back the two Batch 2 River’s from the Far East/ Pacific where granted they have done a reasonable job , or proved the concept at least and replace them with T31 a larger and much more suited ship. Far better to have all five Batch 2 OPV closer to home and able to focus on the Caribbean and Med for which they are ideal ( and the treat much lower) and leave T31 to cover the Far East and Gulf. IMHO!
It’s not only the warfighting function of a frigate; there are too many issues with remote operation, as Ukraine has found with Drones. They only work where there’s jamming, if connected via fibre optics. That’s all well and good on land over a narrow piece of battlefield. When an F-18 Growler and perhaps a fifth-gen version comes along, the naval drone command-and-control system would, I imagine, need to be resistant to jamming. If you can jam it, you can get on board and take it over; from what I have seen, there’s been no plan to deploy missile-equipped drones from the likes of a T26 or T31 and control them by wire, extending the Frigate’s missile envelope well beyond the horizon. If you could do that and load the drone with six anti-air/anti-ship missiles, you would have a platform that could detect and take out incoming attackers at 60+ miles.
We would still need Frigates and the humans on them for peacetime ops. A drone can’t make much of a Port visit, detain drug smugglers, rescue those in danger, or provide a presence the current flotilla (Note: I never said fleet) can.
I couldn’t put it better. You have picked out all the pitfalls and I for one agree with everything you have said.
I think to say it’s dead and gone is wrong, because it’s hard to kill something that never existed, I mean the programme never even got past the concept stage. If the new government came to their senses and funded defence there’s no reason to say they couldn’t restart the programme.
T83 was terminated for the totally Untested lots of Moving Parts HYBRID NAVY!!!..Which we have been assured will work first time…!!!
This is the MOD.! Don’t forget the T83 yet..!
Could not have put it any better. No more plans, no more by 2030 or 2035. Now today do it. Our yards what there is of them are not working 24/7. Retention is a key, get the job pay and conditions right and take back recruitment from civilian contractors. Do it today though.
Ah, good. More research, more reports, no orders. That’s a real startegy.
Timely. Confirmation that CCV will be built at Rosyth; that Norway will build the 3 MCMV motherships; that MRSS will be built in Belfast; of where the T9x will be built???
I think the sloops. So type 91, 82 and 93 could be built in Appledore. They won’t be any bigger than the Irish naval service Samuel Beckett class.
You mean the ones they managed to damage by doing fit out on the tidal river and leaving the ships sitting in the mud in storms?
The Point class replacement should go there, they’re soon running out of lifespan.
The government keeps banging on about the future drone fleet.
It is unknown undeveloped and unproven technology and its not going to be quick to develop and test.
Building the type 83 in parallel with the drone fleet research would have been the ideal mitigation strategy.
Agreed.
The CCV will need a top end radar to effectively protect the carrier or anything else from ballistic and hypersonic missiles. That necessitates a large ship to keep it stable and have a big enough engine.
And by that point you might as well fill the extra space with VLS because cells are cheap.
And so we’ve now got a 8000-10,000 tonnes ship with a massive radar and lots of VLS. Also known as, a destroyer.
The other thing that doesn’t fully make sense about the CCV strategy is why do the type 9x have to be tied to the CCV, what if a Type 26 needs some more VLS cells but nothing else. Are we really going to send the full CCV package there just to increase VLS a small amount. The Type 9x should be designed to be “paired” with any of our ships.
I hope you are right because that would mean the CCV is the T83 in all but name.
We should take note/inspiration from the Chinese type 055 destroyer.
We need to start looking at countries that don’t suffer these issue. Namely Japan and South Korea.
How do they do it? Never stopping production.
Destroyers and ASW frigates should be constantly alternating, whilst destroyers are being produced, ASW under development and the reverse.
For the low end frigates, just give iterative upgrades every few ships. Keeps designers in business and means we’ll always have some. Also increases export chances if ships are already under production. Look at the Extended Mogami deal with Australia, Japan builds the first 3. If we can properly run a yard we’d be able to get build slots like that in deals, offering deliveries in under a year to give the customer a ship whilst their yards prepare.
Same goes for submarines. A sub every 18 months is good, but with their lifespan there will ultimately be another gap, 12 subs gives 18 years of building but they’ll have 25 year lifespans. Something else is needed. 2 year release schedule is still great, even Japan only manages 18 months for much smaller SSKs.
Give appledore all the auxiliaries, so they once again, never stop building. Every 18-24 months works given smaller numbers of ship types and just cycle through the ships, Tanker, Solid support, Point replacement, and just loop on repeat.
Initially it is slightly more expensive but once we pass that few years with no gap the amount we save by not having to train up new workers saves so much money.
Smaller ships like OPV, the Type 9x can be built in various smaller yards and again just cycle through the various designs and don’t stop.
And for big ships like the QEC replacement, enough working yards means they can all do a block or two without disrupting their “normal” production much.
SDR, DIP (which decided not to build ships), Ship building plan…. what comes next?