Two Royal Navy warships have been saved from the brink after rumours the Government was planning to retire them.
The future of HMS Bulwark and HMS Albion had been thrown into doubt after rumours that defence minister Grant Shapps was planning on retiring them, with the Government saying “no final decision” had been made on the boats during a debate in the House of Commons on Monday.
But now an MOD source has told the Express that despite the fact “no decision” has been made, the landing transport ships will not be scrapped and are likely to be placed in a “position of escalated readiness” as the UK battles Houthi rebels in Yemen.
They said the ships will “absolutely remain part of the Royal Navy fleet” and will not be decommissioned.
It had even been suggested that plans to scrap the ships meant the Royal Marines’ days were numbered, but the source poured cold water on the rumours, saying they remained a key part of Britain’s armed forces.
They told the Express: “The marines are an absolutely essential part of the navy and are one of the crown jewels of our armed forces, who serve an important role for the UK.”
The special operations commando force is currently facing a recruitment crisis with 1,000 fewer recruits than it needs.
During a debate on the British armed forces in the House of Lords, former defence secretary Lord Hutton said scrapping the ships could represent the “end of our effective amphibious capability”.
He said: “I do not believe that the QE2 class carriers – they are brilliant ships and I am proud to see them serving in the Royal Navy – have the equivalent capability. Neither do the Bay class ships. They are incapable of supporting and mounting large-scale amphibious operations with the fighting vehicles that the Army now has.
“Our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan led us, rightly, to conclude that they needed to be better protected: they needed to be stronger, heavier vehicles. We need ‘Bulwark’ and ‘Albion’ to retain that capability. So we must tread pretty carefully.
“It is hard to avoid the obvious conclusion that we will need to spend more now to preserve UK effective capabilities. The painful lesson from history is that spending less on defence does not make us more secure; it does not make those threats go away, it just makes us less able to deal with them.”
The debate came just days before the UK and US launched joint missile strikes on Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen after they began attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea late last year.
