Politics

UK defence committee warns AUKUS submarine plan may fail

Barrow shipyard delays and low Royal Navy availability expose decade-long underfunding, Australia pays in advance while delivery risk stays in London and Washington

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A UK defence committee’s inquiry has found ‘shortcomings and failings in the delivery of Aukus which threaten to prevent [the submarine project’s] promise becoming a reality’. Photograph: Richard Wainwright/AAP A UK defence committee’s inquiry has found ‘shortcomings and failings in the delivery of Aukus which threaten to prevent [the submarine project’s] promise becoming a reality’. Photograph: Richard Wainwright/AAP theguardian.com

HMS Anson’s February port call in Australia came with an awkward footnote: it was, at the time, Britain’s only attack submarine at sea. According to The Guardian, the submarine was then recalled early to the northern hemisphere as war in the Gulf flared, a move that a UK parliamentary inquiry says has shaken confidence in the AUKUS nuclear-submarine plan.

A report by the House of Commons defence committee warns that “shortcomings and failures” in delivery could stop the UK-Australia-US pact from becoming real capability rather than a long-running announcement. The committee points to decades of under-funding in UK shipbuilding and “critically low” submarine availability, leaving little slack for a parallel programme to design and build the future SSN-AUKUS class. Britain is also prioritising its Dreadnought programme of nuclear-armed submarines, competing for the same skilled labour, dock capacity and political attention. The UK has one submarine shipyard—Barrow-in-Furness—and even the relatively modest £200 million upgrade package for Barrow has already slipped on its timeline, the report says.

Australia’s plan depends on the UK being able to move from design work to serial production on schedule. If the British side drifts, Canberra risks retiring its Collins-class fleet without a “sovereign long-term submarine capability,” the committee argues. The stopgap is meant to be the purchase of three to five US Virginia-class submarines, but the report notes that US industrial capacity to deliver those boats is “in serious jeopardy” as well. In other words, the alliance’s bridge relies on two strained shipbuilding systems at once.

Money is already crossing borders. Australia has promised A$4.6 billion to help expand UK submarine-building capacity, and has sent nearly half a billion dollars to the UK Ministry of Defence, according to The Guardian. The committee’s concern is less that funding is absent than that it can be quietly diluted inside the normal defence bureaucracy, where projects compete and delays are absorbed until they become structural. It also flags government secrecy about the true state of progress, a familiar pattern in big procurement: optimism is cheap, disclosure is costly, and the bill arrives after the political champions have moved on.

The committee chair, Labour MP Tan Dhesi, calls for “strong and visible” leadership from the prime minister to keep AUKUS from becoming “just another plan” fighting for scarce resources. The report’s subtext is that a pact designed to bind allies through shared technology can end up binding them through shared bottlenecks.

Britain had one attack submarine at sea when Anson visited Australia. The committee is asking Downing Street to explain how a three-nation submarine promise is meant to run on that margin.