Britain’s only ice patrol ship, HMS Protector, missed last year’s Antarctic season and this month could not sail home under her own power.
Labour say a successor is funded in the Defence Investment Plan, but they have not said when it will arrive or what will cover the gap until it does.
In written answers published on Friday, Luke Pollard, the Minister of State for Defence Readiness and Industry, confirmed that the ship ‘was unable to sail to Devonport under her own power due to propulsion defects’.
She has instead ‘been towed to Devonport to enable further technical work to determine the most effective future course of action for the ship’. The question was tabled by Ben Obese-Jecty, the Conservative MP for Huntingdon, about her October passage from Teesside, where she had been undergoing maintenance.
A second answer confirms that HMS Protector ‘did not deploy to the 2025 to 2026 southern summer season’. The minister said this was due to ‘a period of prolonged essential and mandatory maintenance to ensure the viability of the vessel into the future’.
The Telegraph first reported the tow on 13 October, quoting a source who described a ‘catastrophic failure’ of the engines. The paper reported that if a repair proves impossible, a replacement may not arrive until the 2030s. The ship was towed from Teesside by commercial tugs, according to the shipping site gCaptain.
The Royal Navy has said only that she ‘remains part of the fleet and any decisions on her immediate future will be made in due course’.
HMS Protector is the Navy’s only ship built to work in polar ice. She patrols the waters of the British Antarctic Territory, supports British Antarctic Survey scientists, carries out inspections under the Antarctic Treaty and calls at the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.
Labour’s Defence Investment Plan, published on 30 June, commits to ‘replace her with a more modern variant to maintain this essential presence’. It gives no date and no cost for the new ship.
Mr Pollard told MPs in a separate answer on 19 October that ‘the previous Government’s plan was for HMS Protector to remain in service into the late 2030s and did not provide for a replacement vessel’. He said ministers judged that approach ‘unsustainable’ and had ‘allocated funding within the Defence Investment Plan to deliver a successor capability’.
But the Ministry of Defence has not yet decided how to buy that successor. Through Project Shackleton, Mr Pollard said, officials are carrying out ‘technical, commercial and delivery analysis to inform decisions on the preferred procurement approach and replacement timeline’. ‘Decisions will be taken once this work has concluded,’ he added.
In July, ministers said the timeline ‘will depend on the method of procurement which is yet to be decided’.
The question came up in the Commons on 19 October, during defence questions on the High North. Liberal Democrat MP Al Pinkerton asked when a new icebreaker would come into service. Louise Sandher-Jones, the Armed Forces Minister, replied that ‘Project Shackleton is looking at the longer-term options for the capability’.
David Reed, the shadow defence minister, pressed further. ‘With growing Russian activity in the High North and renewed chest beating from Argentina over the Falklands, Britain’s only naval ice patrol ship faces an uncertain future,’ he said.
He asked how a single replacement could ‘sustain a credible presence at both poles, while allowing for maintenance and refits’, and how the minister would ‘prevent a gap in capability’.
Ms Sandher-Jones said Project Shackleton had only recently been launched. ‘It is a very important capability, and we will look at the options to ensure we are mitigating the risks that we know we all face,’ she said. She did not give a date.
Labour is the Government and Project Shackleton is its programme. The Defence Investment Plan sets out at least £32 billion for new maritime capabilities between 2030 and 2035, but does not say how much of that is for the ice patrol ship.
That leaves ministers with plain questions to answer. Can HMS Protector be repaired, and at what cost? What will provide the Royal Navy’s presence in Antarctic waters this coming season if she cannot sail? And when will Project Shackleton report, and when will the new ship actually be in the water?
The written answers published so far do not say.
HMS Protector was built in Norway in 2001 and joined the Royal Navy in 2011, after flooding in 2008 ended the career of HMS Endurance. She is now 25 years old.
Main image: HMS Protector among sea ice at Galindez Island, Antarctica, in January 2015. File photo. PO(Phot) Si Ethell, Ministry of Defence, via Wikimedia Commons, Open Government Licence v1.0, cropped.
