Rolls-Royce Submarines is progressing work across seven new SSN-AUKUS attack submarines at various stages of manufacture, according to James Lowe, Director of Future Programmes at Rolls-Royce Submarines, speaking at UDT 2026.
“We’re at various stages of manufacture with seven boats,” Lowe said, describing the level of concurrent activity now underway across the UK’s submarine enterprise.
The work spans long-lead activity through to active production as the UK moves from the latter Astute-class boats toward the future SSN-AUKUS programme. Reactor production at Rolls-Royce’s Derby site is aligned to what Lowe described as the required programme “drumbeat”, intended to maintain consistent delivery across multiple hulls.
“We have long leads up to the first seven boats, and then we have manufacturing production at our site in Derby online for the first boat and the subsequent boats aligned with the drumbeat requirements of the programme,” he explained.
The scale of activity is being driven not only by UK requirements but also, as readers will know, by demand from Australia under the AUKUS partnership. That combined requirement is placing significant pressure on skills, infrastructure and industrial capacity.
“The AUKUS programme is a generational opportunity… we need a lot more skills to support that, both in the UK and in Australia,” Lowe said, pointing to the expansion of Rolls-Royce’s UK-based skills academy and collaboration with Australian partners.
To support this demand, Rolls-Royce is preparing a major expansion of its Derby facilities, alongside the use of satellite sites to increase engineering capacity.
“The scale of the programme… has meant that we’re effectively doubling the site in Derby to deliver those reactor plants,” Lowe added.
The company recently completed the critical design review of its PWR3-based reactor, establishing a baseline for future UK and Australian submarines.
“We now have a design baseline that we’re going to optimise into the future to meet the needs of the UK and Australian Navy,” Lowe said.
Will they be as reliable as the Astute ie only one working,
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Astute class, your Daily Mail inspired perception of lack of availability is everything to do with maintenance issues caused by a lack of infrastructure and nothing to do with the ships.
These have been caused by COVID delays, Vanguard refit taking way longer than expected and a fault in the ship lift at Faslane caused by broken ropes that could not be quickly replaced.
Yes, the Ropes. A major blunder from those in ABW. Before all this was centralised, there would have been someone with responsibility for this type of critical spare, who would regularly contact the “sole” manufacturer to check on whether they still produced the product and what was the potential lead time.
Jim, they are called Boats!
The first part of your post is very disingenuous, the lack of availability is partly down to a lack of spare parts being ordered and ships in build were robbed to keep boats in service in… service.
Further delay in new orders has also impacted on boats now in service approaching their OSDs and basically being knackered and further knackered by putting them out on long term patrols. Both colours of Govt are now to blame.
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To have long lead items for seven boats on order is astounding. I doubt even at the height of nuclear submarine building in the 60’s and 70’s that we reached much beyond that level. It’s even more impressive when you consider just how large and capable these SSN A boats will be.
I just hope we soon come up with a class name so we can stop calling them SSN A.
I really hope we don’t just move to the B names but instead go back to the old battle ship names,
Conqueror, Majestic, Hood, Revenge.
Or many of the light fleet carrier names were great too
Leviathan, Colossus, Triumph
These boats will be the modern capital ships and their naming convention should reflect that.
Aha, a naming debate! Let me pull out my Jane’s Fighting Ships of WW2.
Battleships seem to be reserved for carriers and SSBNs but I like light carrier names, the Colossus class and the Majestic class together make up 11 shps. We could add in Hermes too to give
Glory, Ocean (too soon?), Theseus, Triumph, Venerable, Vengeance, Colossus, Hercules, Leviathan, Majestic, Powerful, Terrible
That’s a pretty good list and as SSNs they’re unlikely to get jibes about Powerful not being powerful etc, etc.
Additionally I would suggest that the T83s get given battlecruiser I-names. Indefatigable has been a cruiser name ever since Captain Pellew’s razee so that makes a good first of class, then Invincible, Inflexible, Indomitable are the remaining WW1 battlecruisers. If we need more (fingers crossed) then Illustrious and Implacable were WW2 fleet carriers.
🗳️+1 vote for the I series of names.
Personally I’d like to see a HMS Ramillies be added to that list
Jim, the Battle Class of nuc attack boats:
Barra (Barrow in Furness) where every Friday is fight night
Bromwhich – run for your life
Birmingham – there, I said it
Brixton – petrol bombing the police brings new meaning to the meaning of Light. Bristol can put on a good night show as well
For a gentler future life – Blackpool (Illuminating), Brighton (feel the ghey and paint it rainbow), Bolton (as in Bolton on the spare parts) and… Bradford – the optimum target zone!
Nothing wrong with them, really? one out of 6 works, how can say there is nothing wrong with them? They do not work, they are not getting fixed fast enough thet have a 16.5% avaliabilty. Strange how 5 all need fixing at the same time if they are so great.
If say out of when we had 700 warriors 540 need fixing at the same time that would mean there is a problem, I want them fixed and at sea but simple fact is 5 of the 6 are not at sea and are broken. If you think thats good then i hope to god you do not wotk at the MOD or are in charge as its deluded to think that is any thing to be happy about.
I have to agree Martin.
I’m afraid I don’t. When you build a car for instance you know at the start that it will need servicing roughly once every 8000 miles give or take. That’s fine as long as you can find a garage to service it. However in this case the garage doesn’t have the capacity to service it for another six months. Is that the fault of the garage or the car?
The Astute boats have a maintenance schedule that absolutely must be kept so that the boats are safe to sail and it has nothing to do with being broken. It isn’t their fault that their garage is running three years behind on doing routine maintenance. If you want to blame something then blame successive governments that kept kicking the funding for the garage down the road.
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“7 new UK Submarine builds”
Can this be clarified to confirm these are actual UK Boats ?
Does this number exclude the 5 “In-builds” already under way that are not AUKUS Specific ?
How many are Australian ?
So many questions.
I suppose it’s not entirely clear, but my understanding there will be two production lines with one in the UK and one in Australia. The UK production line will build boats specifically for the UK. Both production lines will be identical. This means that the seven AUKUS boats under construction then should be for the Royal Navy. I’m not sure what the 5 “in-builds” relate to here. But we do have 4 Dreadnoughts, and 1 Astute being built if that’s what you meant.
RR will build the ‘motors’ for all of them.