Carrier Strike Strategy

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

May I correct my friend and colleague, the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts)? Women will be serving on the aircraft carrier, too; it will not just be men.

[Robert Courts]

The hon. Lady is quite right to correct me. I meant “men” in the global sense of “humanity”, but of course I was referring to men and women. I am sorry about that.

[Ruth Smeeth]

Moving on, may I alert the Chamber to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests? I am also a vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for the armed forces, and its lead on the Royal Navy—something that I am incredibly proud, as a woman, to be doing. You are going to get some grief today, my friend.

Let me briefly give my own perspective on some issues that have been already been addressed. The Queen Elizabeth class is exquisite: its ships are beautiful and will be a wonderful addition to our Royal Navy, as long as we ensure that we have enough crew to staff them—I will not say “man” them. The people who will serve on those platforms are incredibly important and we face challenges in recruiting them, but today I wish to speak about the wider military family, because the people who make the platforms are just as important for our national security.

Our capacity to continue to be a tier 1 military country depends on having a wider military-industrial complex to build our national security capabilities. Whenever I visit Rosyth shipyard or other defence establishments, I am always struck not only by people’s professionalism, but by their dedication. As the Minister knows, they build our ships because they know that their friends and family may well serve on them. It is important that they know that they are doing a perfect job to ensure that the best possible platforms are afforded to our service personnel—the best in the world for the Royal Navy.

The Queen Elizabeth class is an extraordinary feat of engineering. Some 11,000 people in six shipyards have touched the pieces of metal that were used to build its extraordinary capabilities. The platform represents £6.2 billion of capacity and equipment, not counting the F-35s that will be on it, or even the tableware that our service personnel will eat off; as MP for the Potteries, I am sure that the Minister will reassure me that the tableware will be purchased from my constituency. Please, Minister—give me a nod.

I want to consider the aircraft carrier in the widest possible context, because it demonstrates the challenges that we face in the sector, not only in procurement for the carrier itself, but in securing the carrier strike group over the longer term. It has been 12 years since 2007, when the then Secretary of State signed off the paperwork for the aircraft carrier and finally launched the programme to start the process of building it. Flight trials are happening this year. Even from the moment we agreed to build, it took us 12 years to get to this point, but prior to that there was a decade of debating, designing and determining the concept of our future aircraft carrier.

The project has challenged our shipyards. It has challenged us on whether we have the resources, the skillset and the domestic sovereign capability to build the platform. During the lifespan of the Queen Elizabeth class, we will have to replace the Astute programme and update and replace the Type 45. We will also have to replace the Type 23 with the Type 26, and then start talking about the Type 26’s replacement—all in the lifetime of this capability. By that point, we may even have seen one Type 31e.

Just ensuring strike group capability for the Queen Elizabeth class requires a long-term plan for procurement, so my urge, demand and request to the lovely Minister is that we look at the longer term. We need to consider the steady drumbeat of orders needed for our domestic industry to deliver the long-term capabilities that we require. We are still not sure how many fleet solid support ships we will actually get—we could probably do with three.

We should recognise how fabulous these platforms will be and what is required for their use, both from a military perspective and from one of diplomatic and soft power. We should also remember the people who made them: our constituents up and down the country. My constituency could not be more landlocked, but my constituents helped to contribute to the Astute class and the Dreadnought class. This is a national programme, with national consequences, making a national contribution to our GDP. I urge the Minister to give me my steady drumbeat of orders.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Paul Sweeney (Glasgow North East) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate led by the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts), who gave an excellent introduction. He set out the history of carrier strike capability in the UK with aplomb, and spoke highly of our capability and future opportunity, which was fantastic.

[Sir Graham Brady in the Chair]

I share the sentiments of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth), who raised issues about industrial capability. I speak with a degree of interest: I think I am the only Member who was actually involved in the design and construction of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers in Glasgow. Let me mention one of the most striking aspects of being involved in the project. When I first started as a graduate at BAE Systems, the chief engineer gave us a briefing on the Queen Elizabeth class and talked about the complexity of the project. One thing he said really struck home; he put up an aerial photograph of RAF Lossiemouth and said, “You’re looking at 5.6 million square metres of real estate. We have to condense the same number of aircraft movements into 0.3% of the space. That’s how we deliver the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier.”

That shows just how complex the delivery of an aircraft carrier is; an airfield is being compacted into 0.3% of the usual space, and we are trying to deliver the same intensity of operations at sea in all weather conditions. That is why, in a nutshell, an aircraft carrier is such a complex project. It is probably among the top five most complex engineering projects ever undertaken by mankind. It is a great testament to British engineering that we have been able to achieve this capability, despite the challenges posed by the inconsistent construction runs and feast-and-famine orders that have plagued our shipbuilding industry for decades. I think that is what my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North hinted at, as did the hon. Member for Witney. He talked about the bad decisions made in the 1960s. An example is the cancellation of the CVA-01 aircraft carrier project, which was intended to be called HMS Prince of Wales and Queen Elizabeth—we got there only 40 years later. The TSR2 strategic bomber was also cancelled at that time.

It seems that history has a habit of repeating itself. I lament the very poor decisions made in the 2010 strategic defence and security review, which destroyed the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft. That is now recognised as a failure of judgment, and we are trying to replicate what we had, but with the loss of British sovereign capability to build large fixed-wing aircraft like the Nimrod. Looking at the failure to adapt our shipbuilding capabilities for the long term, I fear that the national shipbuilding strategy has a series of flaws that we have to be aware of.

On the construction of the aircraft carrier, there was real difficulty getting match-fit again in order to deal with the scale of the project. That is largely what I was concerned about in Govan. I have a photograph of me standing in bay 1 of the ship block and outfit hall at Govan as lower block 4 was being transferred out of that hall and on to a barge in order be taken to Rosyth. The size and beam of the aircraft carrier was dictated by the fact that the shipyard was built by a Norwegian company to build gas tankers in the late 1980s and 1990s. The width of the aircraft carrier was determined by the size of the hall. We were building it in a shipyard that was never designed or constructed to build an aircraft carrier—the whole structure of the carrier was designed around our industrial limitations.

It feels like we have not learned from the mistakes made and the constraints imposed by industry in this project, which is why we have not really looked at how the national shipbuilding strategy is getting us to upper-quartile performance in world shipbuilding. That is a glaring omission from the document. I hope that the work of the all-parliamentary group on shipbuilding and ship repair, which is bringing forward a review of the national shipbuilding strategy in the next few weeks, will offer constructive and positive suggestions of how we can improve that strategy. It is critical that we get this right.

Looking at the threat to the shipbuilding industry, in Glasgow, 2,723 people are supported on a full-time-equivalent basis by the shipbuilding industry. It supports an additional 3,220 jobs in Scotland, which speaks to the scale of the aircraft carrier project. It supported 8,000 shipyard workers in—I make a slight correction here—eight shipyards. If Scotstoun and Govan are included as separate, distinct shipyards, there are eight. Never confuse Govan and Scotstoun as a single shipyard—that is a fatal error in Glasgow.

[Ruth Smeeth]

I think my hon. Friend might want to raise this issue with the Minister, because that the data available on the Royal Navy website says otherwise.

[Mr Sweeney]

We must correct the Ministry of Defence; otherwise, some fairly indignant Glaswegians will be coming to bang on its door.

The issue goes back to the drumbeat of orders, and stability in the order book. I used to sit with colleagues in the shipyard and we would look at resource planning. We would plug in different projects and see the curve of labour demand over the next 10 to 15 years. We knew that redundancies or contractions would have to be made at some point, because the loading of the shipyard’s work programme was not smoothed; there was failure by the Ministry of Defence, the Treasury—in terms of financing projects—and the industry to co-ordinate properly to ensure as stable and smooth a curve as possible. That kind of curve would have delivered learning-curve benefits, industrial efficiency and the confidence to invest in world-class infrastructure and processes, and would create a virtuous cycle that delivers a world-class, competitive edge that would mean we could sell ships around the world at a competitive price, and deliver a sustainable and growing shipbuilding industry.

If we can optimise that equation, we will be in a good place, but I fear that the national shipbuilding strategy will not address that issue. One of the symptoms is the Type 31e. It is a laudable aspiration, but the reality is that we are committing the same mistake time and again. We are going to year zero and designing and building a new platform from scratch every time. That is a total failure to understand how industry works. The Americans have been building the same class for the last 30 years, with incremental improvements to the same platform. We need to work to that sort of concept. There is no reason why we cannot adapt the Type 45 and Type 26 hulls for a number of different uses. Building the ship as a raw steel box is only about 8% of the overall capital cost; it is how it is fitted out that drives the cost into the platform. If we can get a standardised, basic ship type for each type of ship needed for the Royal Navy, we can drive efficiency into the programmes, get more hulls into the water, and build a rigorous, carrier strike battle group around the Queen Elizabeth class, which would allow us to get the bulk back into the Royal Navy.

I have spoken to the Royal Navy, which says it has 19 escorts, but it needs 24 to meet all its planning needs. The Navy needs to bridge that gap, but how will we do it? There is no explanation of how that is happening. I would say that we need another 24 plus. We had 32 escorts as recently as 20 years ago. How do we get back to that situation? I do not think that Type 31s will solve that problem. How do we fix that issue? It is not just about looking at the aircraft carriers, which is a fantastic class of ship in isolation; it is about how we build that resilience into the carrier strike battle group. If we do not get a correct and efficient escort proposition, we will not meet that need. That goes back to getting our industrial capability correct—something that is not being addressed by the national shipbuilding strategy.

Another symptom of the problem is the fleet solid support ships competition. If you ask me, it is absolutely insane even to entertain the idea of an international competition for this, because it belies any understanding of how to drive value into the project. Looking at the fleet solid support ships, 6,700 jobs will be created or secured, including 1,800 shipyard jobs and 450 apprenticeships. Some £272 million will be recycled back into the UK economy through wages and supply of payments to the Treasury. Those figures must be weighted in the judgment for the UK bid on fleet solid support ships, and they must be weighted into the need to sustain the critical mass of industrial capability that the aircraft carrier left as a legacy at Rosyth.

In the next few years, we are potentially looking at over 1,000 job losses across the Babcock group, and at the closure of Appledore, which built the bulbous bows for the aircraft carrier. There are huge industrial capabilities at risk. Look at the Rugby site, which builds electric motors for the integrated electric propulsion system for the Type 45 and the aircraft carrier—one of the most fantastic industrial achievements of the UK. That is at risk again; General Electric proposes closing that strategically important site. These things need to be gripped by the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury, because we are losing a war of attrition on our industrial capability in the shipbuilding industry.

[Ruth Smeeth]

I want to touch on the capability that we are losing from General Electric. We have already lost one of the capabilities, which was in Kidsgrove in my constituency. We were given assurances that the capability would be sustainable long term after its redeployment to Rugby and Stafford, yet we are losing it. Industry is just not supporting us in the right way if that is not part of the sovereign skills capability and it knows there is a steady drumbeat of orders.

[Mr Sweeney]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. It is critical that we look not just at the first-tier equipment manufacturers, such as BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce, in which the Government have golden shares and can direct operational decision making to an extent, but at the second and third-tier supply chains. After all, 3,000 people involved in the aircraft carrier project were in the supply chains. We need to look at the industrial capabilities that are critical to maintaining sovereign capability. It is clear that General Electric has made an operational decision to move that capability to France. That is not in the British national interest, so we need to make it clear that we will not accept that. It is as simple as that. It is the Government’s duty to make that case and use whatever leverage is required to make General Electric change its mind. The Government are there to correct negative market decisions, and that is what needs to happen to sustain our industrial capability.

My vision is of a better national shipbuilding strategy that looks to the future and the capabilities that we need to sustain, and ensures that we have a long-term capital investment proposition with the Treasury that reflects the complexity and long-term nature of shipbuilding programmes, finances them properly on a multi-year, generational basis, and invests in the capital infrastructure that is required to get our shipyards match-fit. It is a great tragedy that the world-class shipbuilding capability on the Clyde has not been realised, and that we are still building Type 26s in the same old hall built by a Norwegian company for gas tankers in the 1980s. It has served us well, but when the business case was made for building that hall in the 1980s, we sure as hell did not think we would be building aircraft carriers and Type 26 frigates in it.

This is about not just the narrow business case of one programme and the investment for building Type 26s in the shipyard, but all the other ships that will follow in its wake. This is a 50 to 60-year capital investment programme. The industrial benefit of doing that is enormous, and the Ministry of Defence has not addressed it. I hope the Minister will address that point, because it is crucial that we start to think about this in those terms. The silo mentality about projects does not serve our defence industrial capability. We need a much broader view and much more integration to secure our skills base. We must infuse our ageing shipbuilding workforce with more apprentices. We need sustainable training programmes and a stable demand pipeline through programmes such as the fleet solid support ships, which should be plugged in to take up the slack that has come from the downscaling of the aircraft carrier programme.

Similarly, why are we not planning for a proper replacement for HMC Ocean, rather than retrofitting merchant vessels? That is a rather foolish and superficial way of doing it. Let us build a new helicopter landing platform, a replacement for the Albion class and a world-class shipyard that is able to deliver them. That is what we need to do to pull all this together and realise the industrial legacy of the Queen Elizabeth-class programme, which was an exemplar of British engineering. It was a truly world-class, world-leading programme. We talk about building the space shuttle and the international space station, but the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier is up there with the most complex engineering projects ever undertaken by the human race. We should have a great national celebration of that achievement. Let us make the most of the legacy.