Plans to improve the maintenance of Royal Navy submarines and the infrastructure required to keep them at sea have been inspected by the First Sea Lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins.
Earlier this month the Royal Navy officially launched its Submarine Maintenance Recovery Plan (SMRP) a scheme aimed at improving the availability of the RN’s submarine fleet which was built at the Barrow shipyard.
General Jenkins visited HM Naval Base Clyde accompanied by Chief of Defence Nuclear, Madeline McTernan, where plans are underway to create a new temporary engineering space designed to rapidly boost levels of maintenance.
“Submarine maintenance throughput needs to drastically improve,” said General Sir Gwyn Jenkins. “We want to put a radical engine for change in the middle of our enterprise, to recharge and refocus our priorities and get us ready for the warfighting footing we need.”
He added: “I challenged the Submarine Directorate, in partnership with the Submarine Delivery Agency, to give me a new methodology for driving maintenance productivity up. Now it’s here, I will get weekly updates from the team, and we are planning for productivity to improve dramatically over the next four years.”
Getting submarines to sea to meet defence demands is a top priority for the Royal Navy and while there have been teams and initiatives working on the problem in the past, the RN says the scale and complexity of the enterprise has made it difficult for those teams to achieve the desired effect. Different projects have often lacked the dedicated resources required and focus and were only ever able to address parts of the problem.
The RN says for the first time, the SMRP will bring together the current change activities and teams, turning it into a single recovery plan, with clear priorities, executed by everyone across the enterprise working as a single team.
One change is the creation of a new engineering workshop space at HMNB Clyde which is designed to increase the capacity of engineering work in just a matter of months. Existing defence containerised workshops will be used to provide 90 square metres of workshops within the next month to conduct vital engineering works.
While the deployable workshop will be a solution to increasing submarine maintenance in the immediate term, more temporary facilities are also planned, and a further facility off-site has already been identified, acquired, and is now being adapted to meet the fleet’s long-term needs.
As well as visiting the location of the new workshop and inspecting the plans, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins also received briefings on the progress of future infrastructure projects at HM Naval Base Clyde and met with industry partners who help support the base’s vital work operating the Royal Navy’s submarine fleet and maintaining the Continuous At Sea Deterrent.
