Next-generation warships ‘will have crews of just 50’ as recruitment crisis deepens

THE next generation of British frigates will be crewed by as few as 50 sailors amid a recruitment crisis within the Royal Navy, according to defence contractor Babcock.

John Howie, the company’s corporate affairs chief, said technological advances were expected to bring crewing requirements down further following significant reductions on the most recent vessels.

He said that while the Type 31 frigates being built for the Navy require a core crew of about 105 sailors, the company believes the next generation – often referred to as Type 32 – should only require half that number.

The Armed Forces are battling recruitment shortages, and the Navy is reportedly considering plans to mothball the amphibious assault ships HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark owing to a lack of personnel.

In the year to the end of March 2023, the Navy fell 27 per cent short of its annual recruitment target.

The services are also embroiled in a row over diversity, with soldiers told to avoid “Christian elements” in Acts of Remembrance on Armistice Day.

This weekend The Telegraph revealed the Army was seeking to relax security checks on overseas recruits to boost inclusion – a proposal criticised by Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, who warned that a “woke” and “extremist

culture” was taking hold.

Mr Howie said further technological advances might ease pressure on staffing problems, pointing to how crew sizes have become significantly smaller on some ships already. For example, the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth can operate with a crew of about 750 – down from the thousands previously required for vessels of its size.

Plans for the Type 32 were announced four years ago but little progress with the programme has been announced since then.

Babcock and BAE Systems are among the firms expected to bid to build the future warships.

Asked whether further advances could help ease recruitment issues, Mr Howie said: “If you take HMS Queen Elizabeth, she was designed with a core crew of about 750. But on the old carriers it was a couple of thousand.

“A lot of that’s been done… through the highly mechanised weapons handling system. On a US carrier they’ve got 250 people doing something that needs just a handful on Queen Elizabeth, because it’s been mechanised.

“Type 31’s got a core crew which is much lower than Type 23. So some of it you’re getting through remote monitoring and compartments, some of it through automation.

“People talk about a Type 32 frigate – we like to refer to it as Type 31, batch two. We’re doing a crew of about 105 on Type 31, so realistically we should be aiming to halve that number for the next batch.”

Where is the pressure for the Armed Forces to invest so much time and effort in “diversity and inclusion” coming from? There is not a public demand for this to happen: most people want our servicemen and women to be recruited and trained properly to defend the country from its enemies.

Yet the Services are increasingly in thrall to the same new ideological doctrines that have taken a grip on the public and corporate sectors. The Army is expected to have a “diversity practitioner” for every 100 soldiers. Unit commanding officers are also assigned a series of diversity-related tasks to report on the “lived experience of personnel in their unit”.

Any relaxation of the security vetting procedures for overseas applicants is, as a group of senior officers has put it, “dangerous madness” in a world where Islamism and other extremism are rampant. The only people who benefit from a narrow obsession with diversity are this country’s enemies.

Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, said an extremist identity culture had infiltrated the Army, though the Royal Navy and RAF are similarly affected. How has this been allowed to happen? Mr Shapps has held talks with military chiefs about the issue and has launched a review of diversity and inclusion policies in his department.

But there are too many reviews that don’t result in action. Woke ideology is so deeply embedded that those charged with turning back the tide can fail to see where the issues are, or can be too scared to say so for fear of being denounced.

One problem the diversity drive is supposed to address is the poor recruitment record in the Armed Forces. But this is largely caused by the removal over the years of the traditional high-street recruitment centres and their replacement with an outsourced online system run by Capita, which many feel is not up to the task.

The whole approach threatens to put people off seeking to join the Armed Forces in the first place, especially if divisive new policies damage the esprit de corps essential to a well-functioning military.

If Mr Shapps wants to “stop time and resources being squandered to promote a political agenda”, he could do something practical like restore the time-honoured method of recruiting for the Armed Forces.

“It is time for a proper shake-up, designed to refocus the military on its core mission – being a lethal fighting force,” he said. We agree.