That was in January 2020 - the UK position changed in June 2020.....
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...e-of-its-f-35s
British Government Says It Might Pass On $27M Upgrade For Some Of Its F-35s
The U.K. government has disclosed for what appears to be the first time that it is not necessarily committed to eventually upgrading all 48 of
the F-35B Joint Strike Fighters that it plans to buy with the still-in-development and increasingly costly
Block 4 package. Jets without the updates would be left with more limited capabilities. This also raises questions about how existing and future F-35 operators might approach the same question.
Jeremy Quin, the U.K. Minister for Defense Procurement and member of the country's Conservative Party, offered this note about upgrading the F-35Bs in response to a question from Kevan Jones, a member of parliament from the opposition Labor Party, on June 23, 2020.
Jane's Gareth Jennings noted the exchange in Hansard, the official record of the proceedings of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, on Twitter.
Jones asked "
whether the F-35 Block 4 upgrade is already (a) costed and (b) budgeted for in the existing F-35 programme budget for the U.K.; how many aircraft will be upgraded; and what the forecast programme cost range is."
"
The F-35 Block 4 upgrade has been included in the U.K. F-35 programme budget since its inception," Quin responded. However, "
decisions on the number of aircraft to be upgraded will be made on the basis of military capability requirements."
The clear implication here is that while Block 4 has been a factor in the U.K. government's budgeting around the F-35, that doesn't mean that it plans to upgrade all 48 of the jets it expects to receive. Quin also declined to offer a figure for the total project cost of the upgrades.....
If the U.K. government does expect the unit cost of the upgrade package to be around $27.4 million, that would amount to increasing the purchase price of the jets by roughly a quarter or more. There have already been questions about whether there might be cuts to the planned British F-35 fleet in the face of other budget uncertainty in recent years.
Joint Strike Fighter operators could certainly use aircraft without the upgrades for training or test and evaluation roles, just as the branches of the U.S. military have done with their older aircraft. However, for smaller operators, relegating some of the handful of jets they have to primarily non-combat missions would reduce the overall combat capacity of their F-35 fleets and would result in mismatched fleet management.
All told, the U.K. government's ambiguous statement about whether or not it will upgrade all of its F-35Bs with the Block 4 package only further underscores the difficulties and growing costs that Joint Strike Fighter operators will continue to have to mitigate and defray as time goes on in order to get the most out of their F-35 fleets.....