Death knell at defence facility
Babcock confirms closure of DSG
Stirling’s Defence Support Group plant in Forthside is to close in May with the loss of 56 jobs.
Workers face voluntary or compulsory redundancy from the facility which is owned by arms giant Babcock and provides repair and maintenance services for the Army’s wheel-based land vehicles and light guns.
Babcock were in 2015 awarded by the Ministry of Defence the £900 million contract to run the Forthside facility and other DSG depots across the UK.
A year later, the company announced that DSG Stirling would close in 2022 and the work move to Leuchars Barracks.
However, in September last year, Babcock began consultation with staff on a proposal to shut the Stirling facility much earlier than planned.
Both Stirling MP Stephen Kerr and MSP Bruce Crawford hit out at the plans and union Unite said it would leave Scotland-based Army and Reserve units relying on a “man in a van service” operating from Catterick, Yorkshire.
However, this week a spokesman for Babcock, said: “Staff will be leaving the site progressively between now and the end of May 2018, when Babcock will exit the Forthside estate in Stirling.
“Future work in Scotland will be carried out in Arbroath, Kinloss and Leuchars, and will continue in Edinburgh.”
One member of staff at Babcock in Forthside said some colleagues with long periods of service were leaving with the equivalent of two years’ salary in compensation.
He added: “In some cases, it was their interests to take voluntary redundancy but the closure of the plant is a bitter pill because the service we currently supply to the Army will not be replicated.
“Once Forthside closes and you have a situation in which an Army vehicle breaks down in Scotland and it looks as it will take more than four hours to repair, the vehicle will have to be put on a low-loader and transported to the base in Catterick, Yorkshire, for that repair to be carried out.”
He added: “There’s at least 70 years of history enshrined in the workshops at Forthside, dating back to the time when it was run by Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and Babcock have killed the operation in two years. It leaves a very bitter taste.”
Mr Kerr, who has argued for the retention of the Forthside base, told the House of Commons last Monday: “I very much regret that as things stand I appear to have failed to convince the MOD to exercise its voice of customer with Babcock and to site the mobile defence support group unit for Scotland in my constituency.
“That is a wrong decision, especially given the calibre of the highly skilled and extremely loyal workforce, whose support of our armed forces include regular and repeated tours of duty in war zones such as Afghanistan and Iraq. These workers ... deserve better from the MOD.”
Stirling MSP Bruce Crawford said the closure was “deeply disappointing” and added: “This early closure of the Babcock DSG operation in Stirling comes as a direct result of the Tory Government’s decision to close the Forthside Barracks by 2022 – something that I have always strongly opposed.
“It is a sad day indeed. The Tory UK Government is dismantling Stirling’s historical relationship with our armed forces and they should hang their head in shame.”