This is a significant increase over their predecessors which should reduce through-life support costs but has contributed to the high initial price tag of £31Bn for the four vessels. The Dreadnought class are designed from the outset to have a service life of 35-40 years. BAE Systems has worked very hard to create a COVID-safe working environment, with 95% of employees now back at work in Barrow.

Over such a long programme there may be opportunities for the lost time to be made up. Unfortunately this week it became clear that the disruption caused by the pandemic has delayed the project by around 5 months and DP2 has subsequently been extended until March 2022. The next 5 years will be the most expensive phase of the programme but the NAO says so far the project “remains within budget and on track for the first of class, HMS Dreadnought, to enter service in the early 2030s”. The programme is currently in Delivery Phase 2 (DP2), intended to run until March 2021 and had seen expenditure of around £7Bn on the concept, assessment, and early delivery phases up to April 2019. King George VI is new to the RN, being named after Queen Elizabeth’s father who served in the navy where he saw action at Jutland in WWI.

The first 3 names echo famous battleships of the 20th Century, although Warspite and Valiant were also used for two of the RN’s first-generation SSNs.

The third boat will be named HMS Warspite and the final boat, HMS King George VI. Although still relatively early days and available information is inevitably limited, some further details of the boat’s design and progress on this vast project have emerged since our first article on the subject in 2017.įirst steel was cut for HMS Dreadnought in October 2016 and work on the second boat, HMS Valiant, was begun in September 2019. The first of Britain’s new nuclear deterrent submarines, HMS Dreadnought has now been under construction for over 4 years.

Ohio class submarine interior head