I think Serge puts things neatly in perspective. Just under a year ago CVF looked in real danger of being cancelled outright, despite the fact that steel had been cut, large sums expended and a huge amount of work put into plans and design. As soon as he was elected Cameron made it very obvious that he had little interest or knowledge of Defence, despite his constant protestation that he was ‘passionate about our Forces’ Osborne even less – to the point of being openly derisory about the Carriers, which he refered to as ‘those things’. Lets give credit where its due. If it hadnt been for Liam Fox plus a very clever contract drawn up between BAE and the previous administration who saw SDR (in contrast to which the current lots SDSR is a pathetic farce) as their defence legacy, and to which CVF was central, the Carriers would have gone. What had been begun of Queen Elizabeth would now either be razor blades or at best recycled into some form of Global Combat Ship someway down the line. Actually this couldnt have happened because the gap would have been too great and the highly skilled workforce that makes up our indiginous ship building industry (still perhaps the finest in the world) would probably also have gone to the wall. At best working in McDonalds, at worst on the dole….:diablo:
That’s not quite correct, the cast iron contract is not actually for the carriers. Its was to under pin the forced merger of BAE Systems shipyards and Vosper Thornycroft shipyard to create a single warship building entity. The contract is for 15yrs of gauranteed work or compensation equal to the cost of the ship building to maintain the capability in fallow years.
The last lot forced the shipyards to merge before they would grant the carrier contract, however as the same govt had halved the planned Type 45 program, not placed the MARS orders when they were supposed to and left the next frigate program FSC in a constant loop of concept programs and cancellation, the shipyards wouldn’t merge till they had gaurantees as the last lot could well have cancelled the carriers leaving the shipbuilders broke.
The problem at the SDSR was cancelling the carriers or rather the PoW would have incurred the usual cancellation fees as the costings and materials were based on two ships, the back breaker was the lack of any viable designs or the funding to build alternative ships to replace the PoW or the retainer fee whilst they waited for the Type 26 to appear.
If the Type 45, Mars or the Type 26 had actually been in production at the time of the SDSR then we would have mostly likely seen PoW canned and an order for something else placed to replace it. There was nothing as the Type 45s were already at an end with the last ships fitting out and the supply chain being wound up.
The funding for the Type 26 has now been secured last week, but thats only going to kick in at the 2nd half of the decade, which is why i think the CATOBAR conversion price is so high as it included the fallow period for the ship builders when the CVF hull is built and the Type 26 are still being defined.
The daft part is it would probably be cheaper to order and build the MARSs ships or BAE Ocean type LHD as a replacement for Ocean rather than pay BAE shipyeard to be virtually idle but even if we could buy the ships we cant afford to maintain or run them at the moment which is why we havent 🙁
Sign In
