HMS President and Historic Warships

Debate between Karl Turner and Julian Lewis

Thursday 15th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman who has a long record of public service—personally in the emergency services, and, indeed, his wife as well has a particular connection with the Royal Navy as I well know. I thank him for his remarks.

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. It is very important that HMS President is restored not only as a legacy—it is a very important vessel—but for my constituency, as we probably stand to benefit from it. Fibrwrap in my constituency is likely to be doing the renovations. I congratulate him and thank him for bringing this forward.

[Dr Lewis]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that support and congratulate him on his bid for a stage at which we have not yet arrived, but at which I hope we will arrive if we are successful in our campaign to save HMS President.

Colleagues in the upper House, such as Admiral Lord Boyce, have also spoken out strongly in support. Following unsuccessful bids to the Heritage Lottery Fund and the LIBOR fund, HMS President now faces a real and imminent prospect of being scrapped. Unless urgent funding is secured, and despite generously extended pro bono mooring arrangements at Chatham, she will probably “meet her breaker” early next year. This is because the HMS President Preservation Trust, which has been battling to preserve her, can now afford to do so only for a matter of weeks.

One need hardly stress the irony of a warship of this vintage and this significance suffering such a fate in the midst of centenary commemorations of the conflict in which she fought, and just one year short of the centenary of her own entry into service, under her original name of HMS Saxifrage, in 1918.