UK and France ponder CVF work sharing

A final decision to place the £3.8bn order for the Royal Navy?s future aircraft carrier programme (CVF), already delayed from last year, is now unlikely before October or November while French suggestions for a 40% slice of the work are examined in detail. France has already paid a £100m share of design and demonstration costs for the UK project to allow it to build a carrier for its own navy. This vessel would have 90% commonality with the British warships, leading to proposals that overall production costs could be cut by as much as £200m by “work sharing” construction with French yards at St Nazaire and Brest.

Under one option, BAE’s Govan and Scotstoun yards would build two “superblock” sections of the carriers for the Royal Navy and one for the French, giving the Clyde a bigger share of the overall three-ship order. But Rosyth, which has no recent experience of large-scale construction, and Barrow, the UK’s specialist submarine yard, would lose their planned building roles in the contract. Their “superblocks” would go instead to the French yards owned by Aker and DCN and to VT’s yard at Portsmouth. The MoD has been involved in tough negotiations with Britain’s warship builders since last year to try to force them to rationalise their operations to create a viable strategic “UK ShipCo” to handle future domestic naval orders.