Sweeney warns of Clyde job losses without new design deal

A Glasgow MSP with a shipbuilding background has warned that BAE Systems will need a major new warship design contract within around eighteen months to avoid the risk of job losses on the Clyde, in his response to the Defence Investment Plan.

Paul Sweeney, the Scottish Labour MSP for Glasgow who worked at the Govan and Scotstoun yards before entering politics, gave the plan a cautious welcome, describing it as “a step in the right direction, but still below what was necessary.” He said the concerns about capital investment that preceded it had not gone away, arguing that “John Healey’s concerns are still valid” a fortnight after the defence secretary resigned, and that the country needed a significant uplift in capital spending, with defence investment taken “out of the fiscal rules” to make room for it.

His main worry was the gap between the ships now being built and the design work that should follow them. Sweeney said industry contacts had told him that BAE Systems needed a significant design contract for the new vessel within the next eighteen months “to avoid potentially hundreds of layoffs in design engineering and naval architecture.” He described the Clyde’s design workforce as a world-leading centre that allied navies including Australia, Canada and Norway also drew on, and wanted ministers to award BAE the detailed design of the new Common Combat Vessel and to begin that work while the Type 26 frigates were still in build, calling for “continued ship design with known intervals” to hold the workforce together between programmes.

Much of what he said came back to the industry’s long history of boom and bust, and he wanted a firm government commitment to continuous shipbuilding across the three big naval yards. “We need a commitment from the government on continuous shipbuilding at Barrow, Glasgow and Rosyth,” he said, warning that the previous government had been “strategically foolish” to fragment the work across too many sites and that there was a serious risk of job losses in the next few years if capacity was not sustained.

On the design of the Common Combat Vessel itself, Sweeney disagreed with those who see it growing out of the smaller Type 31 built at Rosyth. He argued the ship would have to be far bigger to work as a command vessel, observing that “steel is actually cheap” and that it would need many more vertical-launch missile cells to match rivals such as China’s Type 055 destroyer, which carries well over a hundred. “The Type 31, in my view, is too small,” he said, predicting the new ship would instead share the Type 26 hull form, which he called “the obvious baseline hull design to carry forward.” He allowed that Babcock might pitch a Type 31 evolution, and the plan itself has yet to settle on a design or a build location.

He was dismissive of the Type 83 destroyer the new vessel effectively replaces, calling it “nothing more than a CGI drawing” that had never been a real ship, and he supported the move towards pairing crewed command ships with cheaper uncrewed vessels. A navy could not easily absorb the loss of a single billion-pound warship, he said, recalling that “the loss of the Sheffield was politically disastrous for the government of the day” during the Falklands conflict, and he argued that spreading missiles and sensors across smaller, more expendable platforms put on picket and policing duties would make the fleet harder to cripple with a single blow.

Sweeney said every part of the plan should be spent at home, agreeing with Andy Burnham that “every penny of the defence investment plan is invested in the UK supply chain,” which he said should apply equally to the large floating docks planned for Faslane under Project EUSTON and to the uncrewed vessels the hybrid fleet will rely on, all of which he said should be built in British yards. He noted that Rosyth faced a more immediate test in needing to land a Danish export order for the Type 31, which he said mattered to keeping that yard busy in the near term.

More widely, he said defence work alone could not keep the industry alive. “We can’t be entirely dependent on government contracts to sustain the entire industry,” he said, which he described as largely the case at present, and he called for Britain to rebuild the commercial shipbuilding it abandoned in the late 1990s, when it slid from being the world’s leading builder to what he called “a statistically insignificant player” as China and South Korea came to dominate global output. He mentioned European states such as Spain, whose state-owned Navantia now owns Harland and Wolff, and to financing tools such as state-backed loans and tax-leasing arrangements that he said gave foreign yards an edge, and he cited the troubled Ferguson Marine yard and its long-delayed ferries Glen Sannox and Glen Rosa as a sign of what happens without sustained investment.

Turning the present naval order book into a lasting industrial base, he argued, would depend on a coherent national plan that outlasted the current run of orders.