Foreign-built ships

SIR – British shipyards (like shipyards the world over) have high fixed overheads that need to be covered regardless of the number of ships on their books. It therefore follows that a busy shipyard is an efficient shipyard.

This being so, the inevitable consequence of the Ministry of Defence placing overseas the contract for building the Navy’s new “solid support ships” (“Foreign suitors outnumber British firms in battle for £1billion Navy deal”, report, April 20) will be that it ends up paying far more in future for those warships that it has to build in Britain.

Barely one year on, the Government’s much-vaunted National Shipbuilding Strategy is unravelling, on account of short-sighted civil servants who are more intent on saving a bob and sending taxpayers’ money abroad than on doing what’s right by our shipyards, our workers, and poorer communities in the North of England and Scotland.

One can only hope that the Prime Minister has the spine to resist this nonsense and limit the extent to which the Ministry of Defence is allowed to undermine Britain’s industrial strategy. Dr Mark Campbell-roddis

Dunblane, Perthshire