Harland and Wolff’s recent contract award of £8.5 million from Cory Group, a London-based waste management services provider, signals a notable uptick in work for Scottish and Northern Irish shipyards.
This agreement extends the shipyard’s engagement with Cory Group, for whom they had previously been constructing a series of 23 barges, with the first launch celebrating a return to shipbuilding in Belfast for the first time in twenty years.
The company has been actively sharing the workload across its operations, with a focus on locations that are key to the UK’s maritime industry:
Belfast, Northern Ireland: This city is where Harland and Wolff’s main facilities sit. Notably, these yards are home to one of Europe’s leading heavy engineering capacities, complete with extensive drydocks and fabrication halls.
Methil, Scotland: Positioned on the east coast in Fife, Harland & Wolff (Methil) represents the company’s strategic growth into Scotland. The emphasis here is on fabrication work.
Arnish, Scotland: On the Isle of Lewis, Harland & Wolff (Arnish) mirrors Methil’s focus.
The forward trajectory of Harland and Wolff is marked by notable contract wins, such as the £1.6 billion deal to build vessels for the Royal Navy in 2022, and a substantial £61 million contract for vessel refit with Cenovous Energy.
Since the yard’s revival post-administration in 2019 by InfraStrata plc, now known as Harland & Wolff, the company has been on a steady climb.
Harland and Wolff’s comprehensive acquisition of two Scottish yards has not only revitalised their own operations but has also re-energised Scottish maritime craftsmanship.
Praise the capital for providing the good people of districts 12 and 13 with employment building barges to take away their waste 😀 TFL came out with an amazing document last week off the back of HS2 cancelation stating that the government should invest more money in London transport because it’s creates many jobs in the north building London buses. Obviously people in the north have to build buses because the government won’t buy trains from them. The North of England gets so screwed over by the south on transport Infrastructure yet all the fury seems to be pointed towards… Read more »
I was a little shocked while watching ‘Union’ that similar complaints were being made back in the early 1700s about the increasing domination of London and the South East in terms of attracting business and investment and the attitude it was the centre of the Universe, the similarity of even the words was marked. We seem to have learned nothing in the intervening years sadly.
London is the CAPITAL city of the UK and that is what capitals do and are meant for as the core of any Government and this is no different to other Capitals all over the world except of course for Brazilia, that carbuncle of a concrete desert that serves no purpose whatsoever.
London sucks in far more resources per head than anywhere else in the country, it completely unbalances the Uk economy..if you look at any other capital city nothing compares to London…the US capital is literally a non entity other than as a home of its government…it only has a population of 700,000…
Not really, for a population of 70million we should not have a single dominant city as it starves out all the other major cities and population centres of the UK. You might argue your point for say Hungary given most of its population lives in Budapest for example, but we need all our major cities to be powerhouses, Germany, Holland, France and many other dense populations have successful cities away from their Capitals.
Actually is much more normal to have a small city as the capital in the world that it is to have the major commercial and government centre in one location, Washington, Canberra, Wellington, Ottawa. All English speaking countries that are more successful and balanced than the UK for that very reason. Indonesia just moving its capital for the same reason.
Why can’t we move parliament to York, stick it in the middle free up lots of space in London, rebalance the country with lots of jobs in the North of England.
Indonesia is moving there capital..Due to flooding..Catch up
London spends around 170 billion of taxpayers money for its 8 million people…wales spend 50 billion for its 3.3million…..when it’s actually far more expensive to deliver services to rural communities than it is to urban ones.
That’s not true, London per head spending on Barnet formula is higher than wales at that is before you add in “national infrastructure” projects like the Thames Tideway Tunnel and now HS2 which can hardly be described as a national project despite the fact wales has to pay for it.
But my point was on north England not wales so no idea when you would bring up wales. Look south to all your problems with government not north or west.
Um Jim what is not true..that’s from the ONS total regional pubic spend figures…and I was pointing out the figures agree with what you said London gets a lot more than the regions..infact London gets 21.2 billion spend per million people..wales gets about 15billion per million people thats 25% greater spend in London….I picked wales because it actually gets the lowest spend per head in the county and has a definited population as does London…I could not find the defined population for the North…so I used the best regional comparison I could get….so stop being regionalist😃…the issue is not really… Read more »
I’m not denying the facts, but as a side point;
How much tax do Londoners pay compared with Wales per capita?
Just guessing, but its probably much higher than the difference between spending.
True
That’s one way of looking at it and I don’t disagree with the sentiment as I live North of Watford Gap. I am just glad they are building something rather than nothing and it’s in the UK and funded in the UK. I look at the H&W portfolio and other than Belfast and Appledore I just don’t much future, Methil is also building barges but what else can it do ? No Tugs, no tenders, trawlers or even OPV in the pipeline. And I just look at Belfast with 81 acres and all its facilities and quite frankly it makes… Read more »
I want to see those yards building high end warships and mostly for us, however the last thing I would want to see is the UK return to building cheap commercial ships, these are some of the worst paid hardest jobs in the world which is why they are typically done in medium or low income countries. I would much rather see us build missiles, radars, pharmaceuticals and do research and services than go back to knocking out big bits of metal on rivers. These small yards are great and vital for fabrication of sections for larger yards and I… Read more »
I don’t disagree about the 3 larger yards but if we do go down the route of buying abroad for all the smaller support vessels (like Damen for the Dockyard Tugs) it’s hard to justify the smaller ones. H&W and BAe are either fully geared up for block build onsite or heading back that way. Other than the T31 at Rosyth that’s how it’s done these days rather than from smaller unit builds. I look at the refreshed 2022 NSBS schedule and it all looks wonderful till you get past 2035 for Rosyth and 2041 for BAe. We then run… Read more »
As we are seeing with T23 and before T22, just because a ship can last 30+ years does not mean it’s worth keeping them. My preference to plug the gaps is, as they outlined in the national ship building strategy, for the UK yards to maintain that continuous role and for the UK to sell medium age warships abroad and use those funds + the savings on crewing and refits to fund new ones. Building smaller specialist vehicles like a tug in a warship yard is probably a false economy. Also if we have hot production lines on continuous build… Read more »
Are you saying its not worth keeping T23? I’d say that they’re still some of the most effective ASW assets in the world; T26s are using the same tails and the Americans still like the 23s as escorts. Much better for ASW than Arleigh Burkes IMO
It’s not worth keeping the 23s when they require a £250m refit to operate badly for 3 years and cost 3x the running cost of a newer ship each year. It’s a bad investment. Constant breakages and unable to deploy without constant fixes being needed.
But we are where we are and the old worn out ships need to continue until new ships are ready.
Not when their rust becomes a threat to the crews lives when they try to venture into the northern part of the GIUK gap.
Actually if you read the NSB it doesn’t see it that way. It specifically works on just the existing numbers, plus 5 speculative extra ones which is 19 (24 !). It replaces the 8 ASW T23 Frigates (T26)and the 5 GP T23 Frigates (T31) concurrently and then allows for 5 T32 and 6 T45 (T83) replacements. But because there is neither an increase in numbers nor a decrease in life expectancy it all falls down. Yep 24 ships over 24 years with a 24 year life works fine and makes perfect sense. Unfortunately no one has signed up to it,… Read more »
Think I mentioned it before but H&W from early on had a large number of yards in the London docks building, refurbishing and maintaining all manner of barges and larger vessels and indeed its own ships so the Cory work somewhat brings it full circle.
Good news. Now move forward without stop start. An island nation we were and remain. Ship building is not an industry that deserved to be run down.
U don’t no what u are talking about ldiot
Oops sorry
We’ve all done it.
Off topic I believe in devolved power, and see why there is so much opposition from the ‘government’. (mostly greed and power)
England should have it’s own devolved government, maybe somewhere in the north midlands. Then, the north south divide could be better addressed, and slowly but surely improved.