UK Submarine Fleet

Chris McDonald Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Chris McDonald (Stockton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison.

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this debate. In his time in the House, he has been a real champion for our submarine fleet. It is an incredibly important subject, and I thank him for his work on it. I am pleased to support him in the debate today.

Some time ago, Admiral Lord West warned that the underfunding of our forces over a number of years has caused them to be “hollowed out”. General Lord Houghton made a similar comment to the Defence Committee in 2023, when he also referred to the “hollowing out” of our armed forces. That has been recognised, but I will also refer to the hollowing out of some of the industrial supply chains on which our armed forces and submarine fleet depend.

We approach the replacement of Vanguard with Dreadnought and, eventually, of Astute—we hope through the AUKUS programme—with a new SSN-AUKUS submarine, for which much of the work will be done in the UK. The design work has already been started by BAE Systems and, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Catherine Atkinson), by Rolls-Royce. This will be a colossal feat of British engineering.

As well as the design work, manufacturing and construction, however, we need to think about the supply chain. Filling the critical supply-chain gaps will be required to ensure that the economic benefit of our new submarine design is achieved. Steve Timms, managing director of BAE Systems Submarines, described this as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” to boost education, infrastructure and technology. In his words:

“It will sustain thousands of jobs and generate billions of pounds of investment into the middle of the next decade, benefiting every region of the UK.”

We have heard about some of that today.

I will highlight one specific example of how our defence industrial strategy, which we anticipate in the spring, and our industrial strategy must come together to support that: the hull. That is the part of the submarine that keeps our submariners safe, and it is manufactured from steel plate. Currently, that steel plate will be made of slab steel in Scunthorpe, rolled at the Dalzell rolling mill in Motherwell and possibly sent to Clydebridge as well.

Those facilities have suffered some issues in recent years, such as the ongoing issue with the Jingye steel plant in Scunthorpe and whether it will continue, and that of the Liberty steelworks in Scotland. Securing those capabilities is important, because although the chemistry of the steel is available, the properties that keep the submariners safe—the strength, the toughness and the ballistic performance of the steel—is all down to the processing of the steel, including the heating and cooling, the chemistry and so on. That is down to the expertise of our steelworkers.

Today, I thank not only our submariners and the communities that support them, but our steelworkers, whose expertise keeps the submariners safe and, as a result, keeps our country safe. As we consider our defence and industrial capabilities, my call is to broaden the scope of our thinking to understand that our sovereign capability runs beyond our immediate defence needs. We must build the capacity, the economy of scale and the skills in our industrial base so that we continue to be a nation that proudly has not only a submarine deterrent, but the skills and capabilities to build and grow that over time.