High hopes for a return of the Clyde's glory days

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, May 5, 2002 | by Alf Young

THE experience of defence equipment procurement in the UK since the second world war is a story liberally strewn with cost overruns and timetable slippages, often on a massive scale. Everything from rifles and radar to ships and aircraft have failed to work to expectations or have cost several times initial estimates or been delivered years late.

The era of smart acquisition and prime contractors is supposed to change all that. Faster, cheaper, better are today's watchwords for the MoD and its defence procurement agency. And nowhere will that leaner, meaner approach be more significantly tested than on CVF, the future carrier programme to replace HMS Invincible, Ark Royal and Illustrious with two much larger aircraft carriers between 2010 and 2015.

If the departing enterprise minister's hopes are fulfilled, these 50,000 tonne monsters, each built at various yards around the UK coast in a series of 80% or 90% outfitted modules, each one bigger than a whole frigate, will be barged up the Clyde and joined together at the Inchgreen drydock in the east end of Greenock.

There's plenty of historic experience on the Clyde of building ships in bits and then sticking the bits together somewhere else. In the 19th century Yarrow built kit-form river and lake boats for Africa. One notable example was for the explorer Stanley, then somewhere up the Congo.

In the 1970s, Lithgows at Port Glasgow, just a stone's throw from Inchgreen, would build very large oil tankers in two halves, launch them separately, build a coffer dam around the bow and stern sections and weld them together.

It hasn't always been a happy experience. In the early 1980s the nationalised Scott Lithgow tried to build a semi-submersible oil rig, the Iolair, by contracting out large sections of the twin hulls as far away as Barrow. The technical difficulties that arose when the time came to put all the bits together were such that Iolair turned into a massive loss-making venture and helped tip Scott-Lithgow out of business.

The plans to build the Navy's two future carriers in this way is certainly bold. Whether it is also foolish, remains to be seen, when construction starts sometime in 2004.

Who out of two contenders - Thales and BAE Systems - is to be prime contractor will have been decided a year from now. And just what consortium of companies and yards that prime contractor will then engage to do the construction remains to be seen. Thales is thought to favour the Nigg oil construction site in Easter Ross for final assembly, if it wins. BAE Systems could go for either Inchgreen or Rosyth.

But both intend building in bits around the UK, before bringing them together and assembling the finished carriers at one final location. So it's a Lego-style solution whoever is chosen.

Even experienced industry insiders are deeply sceptical. I know personally one former director of a UK defence contractor who cannot believe the concept is being given MoD houseroom and a member of Wendy Alexander's Clyde Shipyards Task Force who sought reassurance that the approach is credible in engineering terms but was far from convinced by the answers he received.

I hope we doubters are proved wrong. I hope the Clyde gets a very significant slice of the future carrier action. I will be the first to cheer if Inchgreen, in my home town, sees more activity between 2004 and 2015 than it has seen for most of the rest of its existence since it played home, for a brief period in 1968, to the newly launched liner QE2.

Like the pioneering future carriers to come, the QE2 was a ship ahead of its time. But despite its reputation today as another fine example of the Clyde-built product, its departure from the yard that built it, John Brown's at Clydebank and Inchgreen, its home during final trials and commissioning, was a distinctly unhappy experience.

On Christmas Eve, on her maiden voyage to the Canaries, the liner developed serious problems in one of her starboard steam turbine. She had to return to Southampton and have the turbine rotors completely redesigned and rebuilt. It was a public relations disaster. The chairman of Cunard Sir Basil Smallpiece was scathing about the latest addition to his fleet. The then minister for technology Tony Benn tried, in his own inimitable way, "to take the steam out of the situation and put it back into the turbines".

A report by an independent assessor concluded the problems were no reflection whatsoever on the quality of workmanship or of the material used in the turbine. The QE2 had simply been testing the technological limits of the times and had been caught out. But the damage was done. Upper Clyde Shipbuilders was about to enter an extended period of crisis.

More than three decades on, I hope the Clyde gets a major share of the carrier contracts. But given the history of shipbuilding on the river and the novelty of the construction techniques being proposed, I don't expect it to be a trouble-free experience.