How soon they forget, this is old news.
Anyone remember Paul Drayson's "Maritime Industrial Strategy"? Part of that was to allow the build of "warlike ships" (ie RFA) in overseas yards for the entirely sensible reason that the extant British shipbuilding industry is run and owned by defence contractors and with the exception of Babcocks Appledore and BAE Govan have zero expertise in building non-warships efficiently. The last RFA built in the UK (the two Wave class) cost around
£160M each back in 2000/2001. The going price for commercial product carriers of about the same size was around $US50M. Now admittedly, the RFA requirement has generally higher speed (by 4-5 knots) and much more accommodation space (80-odd vs 15), plus hangar and flightdeck than the equivalent commercial tanker, so you would expect a higher price, but 5 times the price? I don't think so.
As a result, the entirely sensible decision was taken to allow the use of foreign yards to build some or all of the ships. That is what foreign yards (particularly advanced ones like Korea) do. They churn out what is effectively a very large box of coated steel, with a more complex machinery and accommodation block at one end and some pipework over the weather deck very efficiently and hence cheaply, but at good quality. If you really want cheap, you go to China or Vietnam, but quality can suffer.
The scandal here is that it has taken around eight years or more and around £20M spent fannying about, before being able to place an order. Apparently MoD were unable to make a decision on the following options, which it took them years to define (!) :
- Design & Build in UK very expensive / unaffordable
- Commercial off the shelf, cheap and quickly available, but no designs meet requirement
- Get competent company to design to requirement and then foreign builder to produce at affordable price
They actually got to a tender point on the last bullet in 2008/2009, where the MoD IPT was actually in Korea, when as part of the usual
PR rounds, the funding was moved. At the time there was a worldwide shipbuilding glut, yards were literally giving build slots away to get work in, but no, we had a
PR round to follow and so ended up receiving a stiff letter from the S Korean MoD protesting that their yards (HHI and DSME) were being d1cked around.
Incidentally, I'm told that one Korean yard was offering to deliver all four hulls in around 15 months and was turned down because MoD "couldn't accept them at that rate".
The going rate for a product carrier of that size is currently $US70M, (or £45M). The contract price for all four, excluding the add-ons like RAS gear and comms, plus the assistance of BAES in Korea to help define the design, is £452M. Only 2.5 times the going rate then.......There are Koreans crying with laughter as we debate this.