Rolls Royce Submarines brings jobs to Glasgow for Dreadnought and AUKUS programmes
An artist’s impression of the new AUKUS SSN which will be supported by the Glasgow office. (Picture: MoD/Crown copyright)
Rolls Royce opens new Scottish office but the MoD foots the bill.
Rolls-Royce Submarines has opened a new office in Glasgow, Scotland, which the company claimed would create 120 new jobs as part of its work supporting the Dreadnought and AUKUS SSN programmes.
Notably funded not by Rolls Royce itself, but by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), the office, at Glasgow’s Airport Business Park, will focus on developing electrical controls and instrumentation, as well as cybersecurity solutions.
Rolls Royce Submarines currently designs, manufactures and provides in-service support to the pressurised water reactors that power every boat in the Royal Navy’s submarine fleet, employing 5,000 people across its business.
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In March 2023, the company confirmed that it would provide all the nuclear reactor plants to power new attack submarines as part of the trilateral AUKUS agreement between Australia, the UK and US. It will also support the existing Astute and Dreadnought boat build programmes, delivering reactor plant and associated components.
Opening the new office, Maria Eagle, UK minister for defence procurement and industry, said the investment would be delivered “alongside an important industry partnership” and would “support high-skilled jobs and economic growth that will benefit our prosperity and security for decades to come”.
Ian Murray, UK secretary of state for Scotland, added that the new office would bolster Scotland’s role in the UK defence sector, alongside the Royal Navy’s submarine fleet at the Clyde naval base, but that it would also form a part of the defence landscape of Scotland in economic terms, “with the MoD spending around £2 billion (US$2.5 billion) annually with the defence industry here, directly supporting [more than] 11,000 jobs”.
The UK’s nuclear deterrent is currently housed on Vanguard-class submarines in Scotland, to which the Dreadnought-class are intended to be the successor. Similarly, the AUKUS SSNs are eventually expected to take the place of the Astute-class boats (which themselves are still in active production).
The Dreadnought-class boats will be built by BAE Systems at its Barrow shipyard, which recently suffered “a significant fire”, although production went on unhindered.
The Dreadnought-class boats are due to enter service in the 2030s, with deliveries being completed in the same decade at an initial expected cost of $42 billion.
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