The Type 31 Through Life Support procurement has been discontinued after a review concluded that the assumptions behind it no longer reflected the right route for supporting the class, and the department is now considering fresh arrangements to meet a requirement it says is unchanged, according to answers given in Parliament.
Ben Obese-Jecty, the Conservative member for Huntingdon, asked by when the Secretary of State will make a decision on the replacement for Type 31 Through Life Support, and was referred to an answer given on 6 October to his earlier question about the corrigendum to the tender published on 22 July.
Luke Pollard, the Minister of State for Defence, said in that answer: “The Type 31 Through Life Support procurement was discontinued following a review of the proposed approach. The Department concluded that the assumptions underpinning that procurement no longer reflected the most appropriate route for delivering support to the Type 31 class. Those assumptions included the delivery context for the programme and the way in which future support arrangements should be structured. The requirement to provide effective through-life support for the Type 31 fleet remains unchanged.”
“The Department is now considering the most appropriate arrangements to meet that requirement. Any future procurement activity will be taken forward in accordance with Defence requirements, value for money considerations and established commercial procedures.”
Through life support covers the maintenance, spares, training, documentation and engineering authority that keep a warship class running across thirty years, and it is usually worth more over a ship’s life than the ship cost to build.
Five Type 31 frigates are being built by Babcock at Rosyth under a contract signed in 2019, with HMS Venturer the first of class, and this publication has tracked the programme’s progress towards launch and the build work on Venturer.
I know it’s pronounced O-B-C but I can’t help giggling when I see it on the page.
Hmm, this actually seems a bit odd. “Delivery Context”, what on earth does that mean. Just because the ships are going to be [very] late shouldn’t mean the through life support contract needs to be redesigned, you just put a set of conditions on the start date and how to ramp up the support work all of which is pretty routine given how routine project delays are.
Either the original assumptions were a totally of the mark, which I think is highly unlikely, or something very significant has changed in the meantime. My guess is the latter. We know that there is going to be a Capability Insertion Period for these ships so perhaps that is contributing to the need to rework through life support? Unless they are planning for a more significant set of up grades to be undertaken within the routine maintenance cycles rather than taking the ships out of frontline service for concentrated upgrade work. That might well require a rethink on through life planning.
Overall this just strikes me as a bit odd.