“There will be additional costs to maintaining the Vanguard Class through to 2028 – we expect that to be around £1.2 to £1.4 billion extra to maintain those submarines for longer.”
Defence Secretary Liam Fox, House of Commons, 8 November 2010
Cathy Newman checks it out
Downing Street would really like the Defence Secretary to start singing off the same hymn-sheet as his boss. Particularly when the hymn-sheet in question is the Strategic Defence and Security Review. Less than a month after David Cameron told the Commons the decision to delay replacing Trident would “save around £1.2bn”, the defence secretary appears to be arguing quite the opposite. What’s going on?
The background
Delaying Trident is one of a very few “wins” for the Liberal Democrats in government. Before the election, the party opposed renewing the nuclear deterrent. In government, although Trident will eventually be replaced, the Lib Dems managed to get a decision on the start of production postponed from 2014 until 2016, after the next election. The new submarines would come into service 12 years later, so the current ones would keep patrolling our oceans until then.
The analysis
We’ve looked before at the cost of delaying Trident. Malcolm Chalmers from the Royal United Services Institute told FactCheck, while a short delay may be manageable, a long delay could be costly.
Announcing the postponement to the House of Commons last month, the prime minister said delaying the so-called “main-gate” decision until 2016 and scaling back the size of the replacement would “save around £1.2 billion and defer a further £2bn of spending from the next ten years”.
Asked specifically about the cost of this policy change, he added: “Overall the cost will be lower – this was a value-for-money exercise. We are driving costs out of the programme, and overall we believe that it will be less expensive.”
Yet today, in response to a question from the Labour MP John Woodcock, Defence Secretary Liam Fox explained that to keep the existing Vanguard Class submarines going an extra four years – until 2028 – would cost between £1.2bn and £1.4bn.
We asked the Ministry of Defence to clarify. An official there said Mr Fox didn’t mean to suggest that there would be additional expenses overall. In other words, where the prime minister was using a net figure – taking into account both debit and credit – the defence secretary was only looking at one side of the ledger.
Cathy Newman’s verdict
Although the MoD denies that delaying Trident will end up costing more, it’s interesting Dr Fox didn’t repeat the prime minister’s estimate of the savings. Suspicious minds would speculate that this is further evidence that the Trident decision was more about politics than finances – a bone to throw the Lib Dems. FactCheck of course is above suspicion, so we’ll be keeping a purely factual eye on this in the coming months.
