UK shipyards must diversify or sink

Vic Emery, managing director of BAE Surface Fleet Solutions, in his evidence to the Scottish affairs committee, expects that after contracts for the two promised aircraft carriers are completed, the Royal Navy order book will be equivalent to one 5,000-tonne vessel a year, and that the industry is set to shrink.

The writing is on the wall for all BAE’s shipyards in Britain unless they diversify. Clearly, with the Labour government’s contraction of the Royal Navy to half its operational capacity of ten years ago, it is unsustainable to depend on defence naval contracts to keep any yard alive.

BAE and other yards in the UK fail to win MoD contracts, such as the one secured by the Dutch merchant and naval shipbuilders Damen to supply the Royal Navy with 29 support vessels. Contrast the UK shipbuilding industry’s dependence on military work with that of small nations, such as Denmark, Norway and Finland, whose highly successful merchant shipbuilding yards can also build vessels for their own navies.