Repair bill for leak on new carrier to be met by builders

REPAIRS to fix a leak on-board HMS Queen Elizabeth, the nation’s new £3.1billion aircraft carrier, will be paid for by the shipbuilders and not cost the taxpayer a penny, the Defence Secretary has said.

The Royal Navy has said repairs are due to be carried out to a faulty seal around a propeller shaft that is reportedly seeing the warship take in around 200 litres of water an hour.

The vessel was commissioned and formally joined the fleet earlier this month, but the leak had been discovered earlier during sea trials of the 65,000-ton vessel. The Navy said the leak was small and would not stop the ship sailing on more trials next year.

Money to replace the seal would come “from the contractors who built it”, said Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary. “This isn’t going to cost the taxpayer a penny,” he said.

Rear Admiral Chris Parry, a former director of operational capability at the Ministry of Defence, said the incident had led to embarrassing headlines, but “in reality this is no big deal”.

He said: “You hear that it is taking in 200 litres of water an hour, that is actually three petrol tanks full in your car. It is not very much. You expect to take some water in when you are operating a warship at sea.”

A spokesman for the Aircraft Carrier Alliance (ACA), a group of companies the built the ship, said the seal leak was known about before the carrier was commissioned and accepted into the Royal Navy. She said the vessel could be taken to sea, the problem is expected to take a couple of days to fix, and it should be rectified in the new year without any need to take the ship into a dry dock.

“It is normal practice for a volume of work and defect resolution to continue following vessel acceptance,” she said.

The ACA has a six-month period in which adjustments and “snagging issues” can be dealt with.

Costs will be covered by the ACA and the industry bodies involved in the construction, including BAE Systems, Babcock and Thales.

More than 10,000 people worked on the ship, which was built in sections at yards around the UK and transported to Rosyth, Fife, where it was assembled.