In response to a parliamentary question from Mark Francois, Conservative MP for Rayleigh and Wickford, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) has disclosed the costs associated with refits for amphibious assault ships HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark since 2010.
Maria Eagle, Minister of State for Defence, provided the figures, stating:
“The total cost of refits to HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark since 2010 is £132.7 million. This excludes HMS Bulwark’s 2022-2025 refit, which was estimated to cost £72.1 million.”
The case of HMS Bulwark is particularly notable. The vessel’s planned refit, intended to extend its operational life, was halted when the ship was retired before the work was completed. Eagle added:
“As HMS Bulwark was retired before her refit was completed, the refit costs are under review.”
This disclosure highlights the significant expenditure involved in maintaining the Royal Navy’s amphibious capabilities and underscores the challenges faced in balancing operational needs with budgetary constraints.
With both HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark now retiring, the Royal Navy’s amphibious capability is transitioning to alternative platforms, including the planned Multi-Role Support Ships (MRSS).
The MRSS programme is expected to replace the capabilities provided by the Albion-class ships.
Bulwark was retired before the refit was completed..this sort of compounds the “tin hat” view that the scrapping of bulwark has been planned for a long time, it was not just a case of “whoops” we have used all the crew for bulwark on our shiny new carriers, but also a case of “whoops we have forgotten to bother finishing to refit her” as well. Someone in the navy no longer wanted the amphibious warfare ships as RN assets and clearly wanted to shift moving land forces around away from the RN and to the RFA. This is clearing the… Read more »
I don’t realy think it was the Navy that did not want the amphibious ships any more, more like it was some civil servant crunching the numbers and came up with a figure , not realizing the numbers,are for an over 14 year period, but what ever when ever any ship is lais up for a while , it always costs more to get it back in to a readiness state, than if we’re in use with just the occasional maintainable refit
It wasn’t the Navy that didn’t want them it was the government. RmAs shown ridiculous to refit them and then withdraw them
Sorry to hijack your comment.
As a contractor that has worked on both these ships upgrading copper comms to fibre.
Why not place both these ships in the channel and ask the electorate if they wish to fund these to stop the dingys.
I know most would welcome protecting our borders rather than retireing these. At a waste of hundreds of thousands/millions off pounds.
Well as a serving member of the RFA we are not impressed at the thought of now facing the prospect of spearheading a Royal marine beach landing with our support ships. How many civil servants are expected to do the same. Seems to me that the Defence Chiefs want to use RFA as frontline but are unwilling to pay us for the risks involved.
As a tax paying member of the public I am sadly forced to agree with you but I suspect that is less that they want to, and more that they are being forced too by the treasury that can’t find a penny for a half decent pay rise for the RFA but continue to pump billions into the black hole that is the NHS.
If you are a ship with a CIWS then you are clearly expected to be entering a high threat environment and it is only right that you should be compensated accordingly.
The Bay class do have CIWS fitted as well as 30mm and Miniguns
On fleeting occasions, we’re too cheap to equip them properly
I cannot for the life of me understand the tardiness of sorting out the RFA pay. It would cost peanuts and rapidly lead to massive boost in deployed days. I am amazed at how well Argus is holding up. She was superbly well built on a no expense spared basis when oil was seriously big money. She has served well but is now getting very old as she was part of Corporate. I hope she is preserved when her time comes as she has an amazing service history! Personally I think the Bulwark refit probably hit an expensive issue in… Read more »
Daft idea but rather than scrap them both can’t one become the stationary training ship at Portsmouth to replace Bristol ?
Bristol is already too big. Big ship, lots of maintainance. Better off using a couple of sweepers just as HMS Tamar was refitted to be used as a training ship on the River Lyner for HMS Raleigh.
Could some of the old minehunters act as seagoing training ships of some sort?
I don’t know what the accomodation is like, but surely with all that deck space more classrooms etc. could be built?
Then you have the toy “main gun” to introduce fire drill and fightyness, and a sonar, depending on the stage in training.
Or would the maintenance requirements of the hull (but don’t need to maintain magnetic traits) be too much?
Money spent on New ships is the answer now but will it be? Construction of the FSS is in chaos. We desperately need a fully kitted yard with trained shipyard engineers the run the place. maybe we should look to the Tyne. I’m not convinced there is a large enough work force at H & W. I hope I’m wrong. This new Gov are not business savvy; that makes investing in UK a real problem as you are likely taxed out of existence before your feet touch the ground.
The RFA don’t disrupt the public with their strikes and are not affiliated to the Labour Party. So they are way down the list, if on the list at all.
Our current crop of politicians have been brought up post Cold War and just seem to be criminally ignorant about defence. Add the left wing, woke morons in the civil service to the mix and you can understand the situation we find ourselves in.
This.
Say the deluded loonies that were in power for 14+ years, trashing the economy and reputation of the UK they profess to love. And yet the right whingers excuse all their duplicity and mendacious pillaging of the public coffers by calling everything that isn’t to their Neanderthal liking as ‘woke’. How pathetic that that’s the best they can come up with… embarrassing actually.
I totally agree; they are a hopeless bunch of sleep walkers.
If the RFA folks were train drivers 2TK would pony up the cash pronto.
Looks from the outside that the RFA is being stitched up like a kipper by the RN, who seem to be handing over a lot of things they no longer want to dedicate crew to do, but that should really be done by a commissioned warship and it crew and not auxiliaries. And also stitched up by the MOD who refuse to pay the going rates for the work.
Yes the money wasted on the now pointless refit of Bullwark could have easily covered a significant uptick for pay and conditions for the RFA. This is how lack of any sort of intelligent planning squanders money and proves that often there is budget but there isn’t brains.
Thanks for your service Ted. BZ👌🎄🙃Btth.
“With both HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark now retiring, the Royal Navy’s amphibious capability is transitioning to alternative platforms, including the planned Multi-Role Support Ships (MRSS).”
That is incorrect, it is transitioning into a void.
Indeed a 10 year void. It would only be transitioning to MRSS if the first MRSS was going through it’s first of class trials now.
I don’t blame you Ted. It’s disgrace. It’s obviously more important to reward thr train drivers who regularly spend momths away and put themselves in harms way all the time. Mind you, the Tories disappointed me as well. Good luck my freind.
Strange how there is no money for defence..but no problem finding £8 billion a year to house illegal 🤔
More to the point buying off train drivers who the public are quite clear are overpaid and there is no shortage of applicants for the role.
Now there is a role which is clearly overpaid considering the market.
Then please consider who pushed for the Channel Tunnel and bowed to slight tinge of political dogma that meant the provider was private, the line was private and the drivers raised the issue of parity with SNCF crews which having attained led to the drivers of the beast John Major created demanding their parity on the back of the get rich ROSCOs in the other TOCs… and the dominoes fell and it is a spiral. ‘Train Managers’ are equally overpaid and the railway is in dire financial troubles because of political dogma. The Govt now need to lay the foundations… Read more »
Maybe not a career for the long term. If you can create self driving cars it’s difficult to justify a driver for something on rails.
That’s too easy. The missing money from migrants does not end up in their pockets. It ends up in the hotel owners pockets, i.e the super rich. They have the money. Our money. There not the government. The government has to lick there boots.
Exactly. I can understand the oligarchy being pandered to by the government. What’s strange is how so-called ‘ordinary people’ (ie right trash morons) also want to suck up to the corporate elites, just begging for some goodies to somehow ‘trickle down’ (and only to them, not furriners or ‘woke’ or disabled or anyone else that doesn’t look or think like them)…
My thoughts exactly
One ‘illegal’ is worth 1000 G Davies 👌🏾
Just to put that into perspective, that’s 2 NEW Carriers EVERY YEAR! with the money to run them (and outfit them with Aircraft within a few years). It also buys you 8 New T26’s every year. Instead we import trouble people who may not fit in and totally demoralise our own. We need a virtual halt to letting strangers in and some competent people to run the country and quit Net Zero and all the rest.
£54 billion pounds budget for 23/24 and we have deployable escorts in single figures,carriers with poor COD,poor AEW and low F35 numbers,retracting RFA,No LPDs,recruitment/retention issues,….Is there a clever plan to let naval defence die off over next 20 years?Or is just bad decisions with no plan?
The “Defence” budget is primarily for nuclear and supporting Industry, the MIC. Take those away and you get a truer figure of what is spent on the conventional military.
Train drivers are paid by private companies. They are also paid a lot less than their grabbing CEOs
Yes and no, although the majority of the TOCs are still privately owned (but not for long), HMG have been picking up the bills since Covid hence it was HMG that settled the dispute en masse.
There are still significant subsidies paid by HM Govt to the various Private TOC’s which form part of the Ticket price – the Govt has been trying to reduce this gradually over the years – https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/rail_subsidies_to_cost_taxpayers_1_300_each_by_march_2023
Once again George, a very good article… So one MP has asked another MP about the refit costs to both the Albion class assault vessels, over a 14 year period. Then, the answer comes back… £132.7m… £132Million and £700,000Thousand. I thought the question was how much was spent on refits/general maintenance, not how much plans for a replacement would cost? So £132.7m (when you say it/write it that way, it seems less) for 14 years of maintenance, minus the £84.6m from the sale of HMS Ocean. When things are laid out in a ‘proper’ account setting/way, things look a little… Read more »
That’s bargain price in the MOD
These numbers will be known by any savvy sailor and so add on the impact of disillusionment and consternation with the powers that be and there’s further reason to leave. Cuts, cuts, cuts drives down retention not up. Why have the top brass not realised this?
I’m just sad to hear of the demise of these ships. I spent 15 years supporting the Platform Management Systems on them and was disappointed when an essential task I was working on was shelved during Bulwark’s refit shortly before my retirement.
When these two go for scap they will be the cleanest and best presented in the scrap yard except for WAVEKNIGHT which has been preserved and kept ward since lay up in 2022. What a waist of tax payers money and utterly short sighted. Oh and by the way you don’t prepare for a new ship design by scrapping its preassessor unless you which to relearn all the same lessons again?
Criminal that Bulwark isn’t going to be kept going for a few years after refit , if nothing else just to help fill the gaps in the escort fleet until the new ships come on line.
What makes me laugh is they are spending the money on housing and benefits for 10 million illegal immigrants, policing Hampshire marches, instead of defence.