Submarine Recycling Strategy

1st reading
Monday 2nd November 2026 Commons Chamber

Motion for leave to bring in a Bill (Standing Order No. 23)

17:23

[Graeme Downie (Dunfermline and Dollar) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to prepare and publish a strategy for recycling decommissioned submarines; and for connected purposes.

Every time I drive back to my constituency, there is one sight that tells me I am nearly home. It is not a cathedral or a castle; it is the Goliath crane that stands above Babcock’s dockyard at Rosyth. That crane came to the area just over 15 years ago to help put together the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, and it has been part of the west Fife skyline ever since. The dockyard underneath the crane has been there for a good deal longer—more than a century—and the people who work there are some of the most skilled that I have the privilege to represent. Right now, they are doing something nobody in this country or any other has done before. HMS Swiftsure, a cold war hunter-killer submarine that left service in 1992, is on track to become the first Royal Navy nuclear submarine ever to be fully dismantled, with the work due to finish by the end of this year. Around 90% of her is expected to be reused or recycled. More than 500 tonnes of material has already been stripped out and recycled, with cabling, circuit boards, insulation and electrical equipment each sorted into its own waste stream. Her fin has been lifted off whole, so that its steel can be recovered. The best of the high-quality steel from these boats is already being turned into components for future Royal Navy submarines, such as those in the Dreadnought class.

Put simply, the submarines that kept us safe through the cold war are helping to build the ones that will keep us safe for decades to come. I have been to see the work for myself; I have been inside HMS Swiftsure and have seen the incredible care, diligence and professionalism that the workforce bring to their jobs. I thank everyone involved in the work, in particular Ken Dyke, the nuclear operations director; Gary Thomson, who supervises the lifting; and Dean McGuiness, one of the welders on the project. They and their colleagues have made an incredibly complex process look straightforward when it is anything but.

Other countries are watching our work. Australia, our AUKUS partner, will one day have to retire its own nuclear submarines, and it will not be the only one. If we get this right, what is being learned at Rosyth is something that we can sell and export to the world. In the end, this is a story more about people than these old boats. It is about the apprentice starting out, the engineer picking up skills that very few people have, and the families who can find a good job without ever having to leave Fife.

Governments of every colour have known about this problem for a very long time, going back to the commissioning of the first nuclear submarines. In 1995, a Conservative Defence Minister stood in Rosyth and promised that the dockyard would not become a graveyard for old submarines. Some 31 years on, six submarines are still waiting to be recycled, and recycling of the seventh is only now being finished. Dreadnought, Britain’s very first nuclear submarine, has been tied up at Rosyth since 1980. She has now spent far longer waiting to be recycled than she ever spent at sea. In 2019, the National Audit Office found that not one of the 20 submarines retired since 1980 had been disposed of. The Ministry of Defence had hoped to have begun this process by 2011, but it has missed that by years. We have had promise after promise, and far too little delivered. This Bill seeks to close that gap.

Alongside Swiftsure, six boats at Rosyth are waiting their turn: Dreadnought, Churchill, Resolution, Repulse, Renown and Revenge. Another 16 are at Devonport. About 200 people are working on the programme at Rosyth today. Carry that work on to the next phase, and Rosyth could support around 300 skilled jobs for 20 to 30 years, and perhaps even longer. That is not an offer we get in many areas of industrial policy.

Since I was elected, I have raised this matter with Ministers more times than I can count. I am sure that they are fed up with answering written questions on this topic, but I will keep raising the matter, because Rosyth should be the place that the country and the world turn to for this work. We talk a lot in this place about growth, usually in percentages and forecasts, but growth should not be abstract. Growth is a young person getting an apprenticeship; somebody landing a skilled job; a family feeling secure enough to buy a home; and a community knowing that investment is coming and jobs are being maintained. Every boat dismantled means work for welders, engineers, project managers and technicians; orders for local suppliers; and places on courses at Fife college and Forth Valley college. However, I am sad to say that some Opposition Members have opposed this work.

At the very moment when the Rosyth workforce is showing that this work can be done safely and to the highest standards, some in the Scottish National party have chosen to peddle unnecessary scare stories, instead of trusting the skill and dedication of local people doing incredible work. That is scandalous. Those SNP representatives are turning their backs on hundreds of skilled jobs, and on apprenticeships for young people in Fife. The men and women at Rosyth are not a risk to be managed; they are the reason this is working. I say to anyone in the SNP who opposes this programme: come to Rosyth, meet the workforce and then explain why they would rather those jobs went somewhere else. Some other country will attempt to crack this problem.

What the Rosyth workforce needs more than anything is certainty. Such skills cannot be switched on and off. If we leave a long gap between one boat and the next, the experienced people will retire or move on, the apprentices will find work elsewhere, and we will end up starting again from scratch, with further delay, further cost and more nuclear submarines sitting in Rosyth, not being handled. The Bill would place a duty on the Secretary of State to publish a strategy for recycling the UK’s decommissioned submarines. It would have to include a timetable for the boats waiting at Rosyth and Devonport, a plan for the skills and supply chain on which the work relies, arrangements for safe regulation and waste, and regular reports back to the House. We do not need any more open-ended promises; we need a published plan, and Ministers answerable to Parliament for delivering it.

There is a security argument as well. Being able to look after a nuclear submarine from the day it is built until the day the last piece of it is recycled is part of having a sovereign nuclear capability, and we should keep that capability in this country. For more than a century, Rosyth has helped to keep this country safe. The six submarines still sitting in the Forth represent years of work, hundreds of careers, and a chance to build something here that the rest of the world is going to need.

This Bill is for Ken, Gary, Dean, and the people they work alongside, and for the young people of Fife who could follow in their footsteps. I commend it to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Graeme Downie, Mike Martin, Sarah Hall, Damien Egan, Alex Baker, Alex Ballinger, Richard Baker, Michelle Scrogham, Lincoln Jopp, Al Carns, David Taylor and Luke Akehurst present the Bill.

Graeme Downie accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 4 December, and to be printed (Bill 170).