Rosyth shipyard expected to win £1bn Danish navy contract | UK News

The shipyard at Rosyth in Fife is expected to win a contract to build four frigates for the Danish navy, worth more than £1billion.

The yard, run by British-based defence giant Babcock, is also one of the final two bidders for a Swedish navy contract for up to seven of the same Type 31 ships.

Competition for the Swedish contract is with a French shipbuilding firm, which has the vigorous backing of the French government.

The contracts have been in discussion for more than a year and decisions are expected within the next six months.

The boom in exports, following a contract to build five Type 31 ships for Britain’s Royal Navy, marks a rapid turnaround for Scottish shipbuilding.

It comes after BAE Systems, which runs military shipyards on the Clyde at Scotstoun and Govan, last week secured a contract to build Type 26 frigates for the Royal Norwegian Navy.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visited Glasgow on Thursday to mark that success.

The smaller, less-sophisticated and much less expensive Type 31 is a “general purpose” fighting ship – also known to the Babcock team selling the design around the world as Arrowhead 1400.

At 455ft (139m) in length and at 5,700 tonnes, it is based on a design already in use with the Danish navy.

Each Royal Navy ship is being built at a cost of £250m at the price set in 2019.

That has meant a loss for Babcock on the first two ships, but it says it is now bringing costs on the third ship into line with that budget.

The first of the Royal Navy’s Type 31 ships, to be named HMS Venturer, has already been floated in the Firth of Forth and is in dry dock being fitted out.

Two more are in construction, with all five due to be ready by 2030.

Navies in the Nato alliance are preparing for more joint operations to counter Russian threats in the North Atlantic, North Sea and the Baltic.

Babcock is selling the Type 31 as a versatile ship to work across different fleets.

It is designed to take different weapons systems of a navy’s choosing and to be built on a production line faster and more efficiently than past ships.

Babcock’s director of the Type 31 programme, former Second Sea Lord in the Royal Navy, Admiral Sir Nick Hine, said the priorities for buying ships has long been “performance, cost and timing” and that has now been reversed.

“It’s the ship that navies need,” he said.

“It’s affordable and adaptable and we can deliver it in ten years. That’s never been done before. The future for Rosyth looks really good.”

Sir Nick has set his team the target of 31 Type 31 ships being built by 2031.

That becomes possible by licensing the design to other shipyards.

The Babcock design has been sold to the governments of Indonesia and Poland for construction in those countries’ yards.

A team from Rosyth is currently working in Poland, which is being seen as a valuable experience in seeing how another shipyard works.

Babcock already has a vast covered hall at the Fife dockyard in which two frigates can be built side-by-side without interruptions due to weather.

It has plans to build another hall of the same scale if additional orders are won.

Babcock says that the current Rosyth workforce of 2,500 could rise to 4,000 if it is successful in winning the Danish and Swedish bids, along with its other work in maintenance of the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers.

HMS Queen Elizabeth is spending six months at Rosyth, six years after entering service.

The yard services the Royal Navy’s research ships, including HMS Sir David Attenborough, and the ships Serco operates between Aberdeen and the northern isles.

Babcock at Rosyth is also running a trial project, begun earlier this year, to dismantle 23 retired submarines which were powered by nuclear reactors.

After more than four decades of delay, the first such submarine, Swiftsure, has had its reactor removed and is currently being taken apart in a dry dock.

There are seven subs at Rosyth that are yet to be scrapped.

Sixteen are stored in Plymouth dockyard, but there is no plan for them to be scrapped there, so if the pilot is successful, that work is likely to be carried out in Fife.

To meet the potential demand for workers, Babcock has been aligning with local colleges on training, as well as recruiting 350 workers aged above 50, often unemployed and in need of retraining with the title of production support operatives.

A further expansion of the Rosyth yard’s work is to become a third base for the next generation of nuclear-armed submarines, the Dreadnought class.

The Fife dockyard already has a dry dock big enough for those boats, and the Ministry of Defence has said it wants that to become a “contingent” base, in addition to their Faslane base on the Firth of Clyde.

The scale of the workload now being anticipated holds out the prospect of demand for rolled steel plates from the Dalzell steelworks in Motherwell.

That plant has been mothballed awaiting new contracts, amid uncertainty over the finances and viability of its owner.

A further statement about it is to be made in the Scottish Parliament next week. At present, Babcock is relying on imported steel.

David Lockwood, chief executive of the Babcock group, said the boost in defence spending by Nato countries including the UK is welcome for the industry, although much of it is going into governments’ own military infrastructure.

“It doesn’t all flow down the supply chain,” he said.

“It gives us more certainty that when customers launch procurements, they will actually finish.

“The most frustrating thing in industry is to spend lots of money – it’s often millions of pounds to bid – and then the programme gets cancelled due to lack of money.

While awaiting final decisions from Denmark and Sweden, the Babcock chief welcomed the success of rival firm BAE Systems in winning the Norwegian order.

He said: “It helps underpin the UK as an exporter of warships to allied nations, which we haven’t done for a long time.

“The UK is in a position it hasn’t been in for many decades as a shipbuilder.”