Yahoo Finance Inside story: the battle to build Britain's new £41bn nuclear submarines
Construction of the new Dreadnought class of submarines which will provide the UK’s nuclear deterrent got off to a bad start when it began in 2016.
The press were transported to BAE Systems’ shipyard at Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria to record what should have been a triumphant moment for British industry as manufacturing began on the £41bn project.
Instead it turned into something of a farce.
Although then-Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon did get a cheer from workers in the chilly fabrication hall as he pushed the button to ceremonially cut the first steel that would go into the first of the four 17,000-tonne vessels, the moment had been overtaken by events.
The story had broken just hours before that the steel plate being sliced up in a shower of sparks had come from France. It was an embarrassing revelation as UK steelmakers were then in the middle of an existential crisis as they buckled under a flood of imports.
Perhaps, then, it’s no wonder little has been heard of the Dreadnought programme since.
Next-generation deterrent
Of course it’s not just the risk of another PR gaffe that’s kept Dreadnought out of headlines.
Nuclear submarines provide Britain’s Continuous At Sea Deterrent (CASD). This means that a Royal Navy submarine armed with nuclear missiles is always on patrol, unseen and undetected, making it the most secret of the weapons in Britain’s arsenal.
But with such a big budget - £31bn with a £10bn contingency during the construction phase, £5bn more than the UK’s annual defence spending - Dreadnought has been the subject of intense speculation.
Now that veil of secrecy has been lifted - a little - with The Telegraph getting an exclusive interview with Gavin Leckie, BAE Systems’ programme director for Dreadnought.
“CASD is in my DNA, my blood,” says Leckie who took the helm just over a year ago, having left a job at the Faslane supporting the current Vanguard class of Trident nuclear missiles submarines.
The first Dreadnought is due to enter service in the early 2030s and cannot be late. The current Vanguard missile submarines have had their service lifespans extended three times already, and will be at least 37 years old if their successors are on schedule. Even if their creaking hulls can withstand another extension, the national purse can’t.
Learning from past mistakes
Lessons will need to have been learnt from the previous projects. BAE is currently working on the final three of the seven Astute class attack submarines, but the programme has not been smooth sailing. The first Astute was four years late and £2bn over budget.
“It was a horrible, horrible experience having to relearn how to build submarines as we did with Astute,” says Ian Waddell, general-secretary of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions. “We had not built a submarine for decades and it was painful getting those skills back.”
Leckie says errors of the past will not be repeated. So far £1bn has been sunk into getting facilities in place at Barrow.
“A billion buys a significant amount of infrastructure that will allow us to drive efficiency and productivity,” says Leckie. “We’ve got a facility that takes flat steel in at one end and turns out submarines at the other.”
About half as much again has gone into systems to aid the work. BAE’s even got its own “submarine school” in Barrow so the skills to build submarines can be drummed into apprentices and graduates.
One of the main lessons BAE - along with its partners Rolls-Royce and Babcock - has learnt from previous projects can be summed up as this: know what you are building before you start building it.
Leckie puts a management-speak spin on it, describing a “good evolution” from Astute being “the ability to mature the design with upfront investment, to the point that you get to the mature state and design before you start procuring or manufacturing”.
In plain English, the previous programme hit trouble because large parts were still being drawn up when production had begun, causing problems when things didn’t fit together. Throw in further confusion by suppliers being told at short notice that something was wanted, only for the specifications to change as problems cropped up, and it’s obvious why Astute ran aground.
Dreadnought benefits from a connected design system which allows engineers to see how things fit together, so they can “buy the right product first time, and build the right thing to the right dimensions”, says Leckie.
That’s a pretty daunting task. Each of the four 500ft long Dreadnought submarines will use components from 1,500 main suppliers - who have to be laboriously security cleared - with a total of 30,000 UK jobs supported by the programme.
The year of the pipe
Still, the project is on track according to Leckie. “Walking through the facility you get a sense of how advanced the programme actually is. The pressure hull for boat one is 100pc complete and you can see the processes for turning flat plates of steel into perfect hemispheres to make them.”
Leckie adds that 2021 will be “the year of the pipe” as 26 miles of tubing which move liquids and gases around the submarine are fitted, and 2022 “year of the cable” as 20,000 different electric connectors are installed.
The sheer size of the project still surprises him. Leckie describes how he was told about the “toast rack” in the assembly shop and how he had to see it. “I thought, ‘What the hell is a toast rack?’”
It turns out it’s where huge pieces of steel are stored, giving the impression of a giant industrial version of a frame used to store breakfast staples.
New technology is also being utilised to eliminate production problems which have previously led to expensive and time-consuming “reworking” when issues are discovered.
“If we don’t focus on quality today it will bite us in the backside tomorrow,” says Leckie, adding that one innovation is automated welding. Craftsmen who would have previously joined steel sheets together by hand have been retrained to operate more precise machines.
“It’s a fantastic development,” he says, adding that “right first time” levels have jumped and quality is now at a stage where “it’s impossible to distinguish between parent metal and weld metal”.
For sailors in a submarine hundreds of feet below the surface with the pressure of thousands of tonnes of water on the hull, that’s reassuring.
How such quality affects the submarine’s noise signature is something Leckie won’t be drawn on, but a BAE report on Dreadnought says the vessels will be as quiet as “an idling car”.
Engine trouble
Dreadnought has not been without its problems, though. Work on the new design of nuclear reactor built by Rolls-Royce that powers the submarines hit problems early on. Industry sources say it got so bad that the chief executives of BAE and Rolls were flying in for weekly crisis meetings to thrash out a solution.
These now seem to have been solved. The way Dreadnought is being built through the “Submarine Delivery Alliance”, a partnership between the contractors and Ministry of Defence, has helped.
Leckie says this means the contractors have sight of the budget, while the MoD can examine the books and see what costs - and problems - the companies are incurring.
“There are no doubts, the facts are the facts,” he says. Instead of working against each other, such insight means problems are shared rather than handed off.
It sounds like it’s working, too. “I don’t see it as a benighted programme that’s falling behind,” said one senior defence industry source. “There’s a ruthless focus on 'schedule first' palpable through the whole supply chain.”
Covid's impact
Covid has caused issues. Barrow went from having 9,000 people on site to just a few hundred in the first lockdown. Like other businesses, new ways of working were found but you cannot physically build a submarine from your kitchen table.
A recent Parliamentary report said the pandemic meant the current phase of Dreadnought has been extended by a year, but the work rate is back at 95pc of pre-coronavirus levels. Overall the project is still expected to be on time.
But with the project surrounded by such intense secrecy - a reference to one material being used in the project has been struck out of this article on national security grounds - it’s hard to be certain if there aren’t issues which could delay it, resulting in spiralling costs and a gap in CASD.
Waddell is more confident. “Dreadnought is one example where the Government has understood that a regular drumbeat of work is vital,” he says. “With Dreadnought, we have now got a world-class facility at Barrow.”
There’s also a financial incentive for Dreadnought to be delivered on time and budget. Sir Michael warned as work started of a “pain and gain” regime, meaning contractors share the results of coming in under budget, but cost over-runs and delays result in penalties.
Still, Leckie remains confident, saying that although Dreadnought uses cutting edge technology “every day of my working life is about managing those risks”.
However, there’s one risk he hadn’t considered. With the UK steel industry on the brink of another crisis, he can’t say exactly where the material from which much of Dreadnought is being constructed from was sourced.
“Various suppliers in the UK and Europe,” is all he can manage.
For someone charged with building something which aims to be unseen and undetected, he should have seen that one coming.
