Aircraft Carriers and UK Shipbuilding

Alan Whitehead Excerpts

Wednesday 6th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I would be very happy to look at the history of Chatham. As my hon. Friend says, Chatham’s historic dockyard is now a thriving and vibrant location, attracting investment and employment, and that is what we want to make sure also happens in Portsmouth. Of course the point about Portsmouth is that it will continue to be a major naval port, with large-scale maritime support and maintenance activity going on; it will not become a historic port in the sense that Chatham has become one.

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

Does the Secretary of State accept that shipbuilding on the south coast has already been consolidated by the removal of defence-related shipbuilding from Southampton to Portsmouth, by agreement? Does he also agree that the contract for parts of the carrier to be built in the naval dockyards in Portsmouth was very much part of that consolidation? Does he therefore accept that the removal of the aircraft parts manufacturing will be regarded as a substantial betrayal of all that consolidation effort? Does he consider it wise strategically to extinguish shipbuilding permanently on the south coast, leaving just one site for UK defence-related shipbuilding?

[Mr Hammond]

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that consolidation of the shipbuilding industry is not a single event; it is a process that has been going on for decades, and the absorption of VT by BAE Systems was part of it. I am afraid that the inexorable logic, given the size of the Royal Navy and the budget we have for building new ships, is that we can support only one naval shipbuilding location in the United Kingdom—anything else is fantasy economics.