Navy has so few sailors ships must be scrapped
New frigates unable to be manned unless existing warships are dismantled
THE Royal Navy has so few sailors it has to decommission two warships to staff its new class of frigates, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
HMS Westminster, which was recently refurbished at huge expense to the taxpayer, and HMS Argyll will be decommissioned this year. The crews will be sent to work across the new fleet of Type 26 frigates as they come into service.
It comes at a time when the Armed Forces are experiencing a significant recruitment crisis, with the Navy having suffered a general collapse in the flow of new recruits. A defence source told The Telegraph: “We will have to take manpower from one area of the Navy in order to put it into a new area of the force.”
The MOD has ordered eight new Type 26 frigates which will be the Navy’s most advanced submarine-hunting warships to date. However, HMS Glasgow, the first of the new Type 26s, will not be operational until 2028 at the earliest, followed by HMS Cardiff, which is expected by the end of the decade.
The move will bring the number of frigates in Britain’s surface fleet down to just nine until the two new ships arrive. The MOD has ordered a further six Type 26 frigates but they are not expected to start arriving until the 2030s.
It comes as Britain considers military action against Houthi rebels over their attacks on cargo ships in the Red Sea. One option being considered is moving HMS Lancaster, also a Type 23 frigate, to support HMS Diamond in the Red Sea as part of Operation Prosperity Guardian, to safeguard shipping.
Critics have suggested that Britain would have more capacity to protect cargo in the Red Sea if frigate numbers were not being reduced.
A Whitehall source justified the move and said the decision allowed the military to focus on “updating the Navy into a modern, hi-tech fighting force”.
They added: “It is always emotive when ships that have a long history of service come to the end of their working life. They and the sailors who crewed them have done the country proud. But decommissioning them is the right decision. The new Type-26 frigates will be in service before those ships can be refitted.”
In the 12 months to March 2023, Ministry of Defence figures showed the Navy, which has 29,000 full-time recruits, performed the worst out of the three services for recruitment.
Intake for the Navy and Royal Marines dropped 22.1 per cent compared with the previous year, while the RAF dropped by almost 17 per cent and the Army by nearly 15 per cent. Although the Government is planning to reduce the size of the Armed Forces, recruitment figures are still far below target.
Lord West, the former first sea lord, questioned why the Navy was decommissioning warships without having a new fleet ready to take over and warned thatthe UK’S warships were “dropping like flies”. “We are losing operational ships, which is all very well as long as
‘With the number we’ve got, if we get involved in any action we are really poorly placed’
there’s no war in the next few years,” he said.
Lord West cited the Falklands war in 1982 when the UK lost two destroyers and two frigates, and a further 12 were damaged, as an example of needing a larger surface fleet.
“With the number we’ve got, if we get involved in any action we are really poorly placed,” he warned.
He added: “If the Government had taken seriously the issue of frigate numbers over the past 10 years there would be sufficient to meet the requirements of trade protection in the Red Sea.”
HMS Westminster, which featured in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, is described on the Navy’s website as having “recently returned to service after one of the longest, most comprehensive and complex revamps in her lifetime” following a 2017 refurbishment and was set to undergo another £100million refit. At about the same time
‘Mothballing ships is further evidence of a failure to get to grips with deep problems in defence’
HMS Argyll, the longest serving Type 23 Frigate in the Navy, underwent a multi-million refit to return her to the front line. After being decommissioned, the ships will either be scrapped or sold to an ally.
Last year James Cartlidge, the defence procurement minister, insisted HMS Westminster was “part of a modernisation programme being implemented to all Type 23s that are in upkeep”, when asked in Parliament if there were plans to scrap it.
John Healey, the shadow defence secretary, accused the Government of failing to get a grasp on problems within the MOD. He said: “That the Royal Navy is forced by a lack of sailors to mothball ships shortly after refits that cost millions of taxpayers’ money is further evidence of ministers failing to get to grips with deep problems in defence.
“MOD mismanagement has wasted at least £15bn of public money since 2010, and satisfaction with service life has plunged to new lows.”
Tobias Ellwood, the former chairman of the Defence select committee, said it was “baffling” to decommission two frigates at a time where the UK’S surface fleet is “massively overstretched”.
“During the Gulf War the Royal Navy boasted 51 frigates and destroyers,” Mr Ellwood said. “That will soon fall to just 16. Yet our world is more dangerous than any time since 1945. The strength of today’s Royal Navy is simply inadequate to handle the ever complex threat picture that is harming our economy.”
A Royal Navy spokesman said: “The operational requirements of the Royal Navy are kept under constant review. The Ministry of Defence is committed to ensuring the Royal Navy has the capabilities it needs to meet current and future operational requirements.”