Cuts force Navy to ‘cannibalise’ its ships for parts

THE Royal Navy is increasingly having to “cannibalise” its own warships and submarines for spare parts as funding has been cut for stores, a Government spending watchdog warns.

Instances of ships being stripped of parts so they can be fitted to other vessels more in need have risen by almost 50 per cent in the past five years. The National Audit Office (NAO) investigation is published today as a former First Sea Lord said it was further evidence the Armed Forces were being “hollowed out” by years of cuts.

One retired officer said there was an epidemic of cannibalisation, and the demands of constantly juggling parts between vessels was badly undermining morale among naval engineers.

The NAO says that the practice is officially a last resort, but has risen by 49 per cent since 2012, with engineers having to strip parts nearly 800 times last year. Type 23 frigates and Astute class submarines are particularly badly affected, alongside Merlin helicopters.

Parts are being taken from Astute class submarines while they are still on the production line, causing delays in the building programme. An internal 2012 naval study also found that, in half the cases for Type 23 frigates, the cost of moving parts was at least as much as a new part.

Lord West of Spithead, a former First Sea Lord, said the report was “extremely worrying”. He said: “It reflects my view that there is a dreadful hollowing-out going on in defence.”

Lord West said the practice, also called “store robbing”, undermined ships’ readiness for operations.

He said: “Twenty years ago, we were doing half the amount of store robbing and that was too much then. It impacts on the operational readiness of our ships and it also has a huge impact on morale because people are trying to do maintenance on these ships.” One former Naval officer said store robbing had reached “epidemic” proportions in the Royal Navy. He said warships returning from operations were being stripped of parts within hours of mooring, so that the parts could be fitted to other ships preparing to deploy, and ships on lower readiness and training tasks were being left without parts.

“Your engineers are required to manage this and there’s no respite for them. You get alongside and just as everyone else is standing down, they have to prepare to remove and hand over equipment. It’s definitely a contributory factor to the lack of morale in the engineering section,” he said.

A Royal Navy spokesman said: “Less than 0.5 per cent of parts we use come from swapping components, and we only do this when it’s absolutely necessary to get ships out of port and back onto operations more quickly.

“We continue to make improvements to how we manage this long established practice.”