Articles
When union leaders and local politicians launched a campaign to prevent cuts at the Royal Navy’s Devonport dockyard in Plymouth, it caused a small ripple in the ocean of news about the looming defence cuts. Much more attention, and column inches, was devoted to leaked letters to prime ministers and reductions in the numbers of flashy fighter jets and aircraft carriers we have ordered.
But the story illustrates succinctly the hidden costs of the government’s impending cuts. Plymouth is built around the docks and the navy. Devonport naval base, at 650 acres, is the largest naval base in western Europe, and employs more than 4,000 people on the ships and submarines based there. About 475 service personnel work in naval support. Local politicians estimate another 7,000 jobs depend on the base.
Babcock’s Devonport dockyard, next door, employs 4,300 people.
The University of Plymouth’s business school estimates that the dockyard is worth more than £850m to the local economy. This is a massive chunk of Plymouth’s livelihood. To the locals there is a real threat in talks of government cutbacks. The knock-on effect for the local manufacturing and engineering sector should not be ignored either. Experts estimate the naval base does business with around 400 local firms.
Yet the cuts have to come from somewhere. At the other end of the country, earlier last month BAE Systems announced it was to cut 447 jobs at its factories in Warton and Samlesbury, where parts of the Eurofighter Typhoon is manufactured. The job losses come after 375 redundancies last year. BAE employs 11,500 people in Lancashire, and has a network of suppliers. Cutbacks to programmes such as the Eurofighter would have an impact just as severe on the local communities in Lancashire as they do in Devon.
Admittedly not for the first time, businesses and workers in regions that depend on defence money are watching with trepidation where the axe will fall. Whether the government manages to slice precisely to preserve capabilities and skills, or ends up hacking apart local economies, is the tricky bit for the politicians.