Harland & Wolff to go into administration
 

Seen the very sad news that this once great UK shipbuilding icon is set to be consigned to history on the BBC website this morning.

Incredibly sad, but it has probably been on the cards for a few years.

The BBC stated that "Unions want the shipyard to be nationalised, a call that has been backed by the Labour Party, but the government has said the crisis is ultimately a commercial issue".

How on earth will nationalisation help.....look what happened when UK Shipyards were nationalised in the 70's?

Link to the article here

And in the meantime we're building RFA ships in Korea. It goes beyond insanity.

Whilst I agree the Korean RFAs are something of an embarrassment (although I am very sure they will be just as good builds as if done in GB) however in terms of volume not enough to keep a significant fraction of one building facility in full time employment. I am for mandating government should spend at home first (any premium in cost remaining in national circulation) however such a command economy would have to mandate closure of all but one or two facilities at the same time. Trade prohibits support of building British Merchant bottoms so unless we are to raise and maintain another Grand Fleet where would come greater demand?

Well when it's all gone, and this applies across the board in industry. We'll be pretty much f*****. I guess then you'll pontificate then about policy and business acumen while wondering where your next meal is going to come from.

I think the issue with UK shipbuilding currently, particularly that of Military ships - is do do with the p1ss poor procurement process they use, which essentially is almost solely based on the price.

Having taken part in a number of bids tendered by the MOD over a number of years , I can say that they are dreadful, costly and painful for the potential bidders, and almost every time - the cheapest bid wins - hands down.

Warships are governed by a similar procurement process which dictates that it must be a UK Shipyard that builds the ship - which currently means BAE Systems, both are poor options in my opinion, I mean - why on earth would the UK government encourage a monopoly - which only serves to drive the price up and the delivered build quality down?

Nationalisation followed by privatisation (with building type clauses on each yard) destroyed many of the private firms abilities to freely compete and ultimately led to the closure of dozens of good UK shipyards, this situation was made worse by decades of under-investment in manufacturing and prefabrication techniques.

I agree with Varley that the RFA's should be procured from UK yards, this way many of the now defunct famous shipbuilders may have still been in existence today, and BAE would not have the expensive monopoly it holds.

Its a crying shame that all of that wonderful expertise in ship design & manufacture have been lost, my old Grandfather and old man would be turning in their graves.

Its looking very bleak for UK industry!

Tom's comment about contracts being won by the cheapest bidder, reminded me of something I read in the papers last month about the Apollo missions. One of the astronauts (I forget which one, Lovell or Borman?) was asked what he was thinking when he was strapped in the capsule, and as the countdown neared "Zero, we have lift off." His answer spoke volumes when he said, "All I am thinking at that moment is that everything behind me was built or supplied by the lowest bidder."

That's not the best thing to be going through your mind when your underneath the most powerful rocket man ever designed!!!

Watching one of the Largest Ships programmes,on Quest recently, the technology on building a Maersk vessel was beyond my imagination...and how many specialised welders were working on that one ship 3000!........sorry H&W no chance there wouldn't be that many in the UK.

geoff

You're right. A friend of mine was one. Time served specialist in the English Electric heavy electrical plant in my home town. That slowly withered away and he ended up driving a courier van. Once pissed away it's gone. And there's been a lot of pissing in this country.

Even more so now...

We had to refurbish a very large thickener drive for a Dutch company. The main gear was unique (9ft diameter) and we had to get special insurance for it's maintenance removal. The client requested that as part of the package, we supply a spare one, cost no problem!


We went with the OEM who had in store the original moulds, in Stockton or Darlington or up that way, anyway. They quoted us a ridiculous price and a delivery time of 12 months - MINIMUM!!! There was only one other foundry in the UK with the capacity and their quoted delivery time was 18 to 24 months - HOPEFULLY!!!!

We duly informed the client and they said,"no problem, there is a foundry up the road who can do it!". The Service Manager and QA/QC went over to check out the facility, the contract was signed and moulds shipped off. QA/QC nipped over a few times to check progress and the finished, impecabbly machined gear was delivered seven weeks later, one week ahead of schedule. The cost was very reasonable, less than half that which we had been quoted in the UK.

The main point of this story is exactly Bob's above - It is not just the case that there is no or little heavy industry still surviving in the UK, there is simply not the skill and a dearth of machine tools suitable for the job.

When I left the above job after my agreed five years, I decided to sign on the dole to claw my taxes back. That is another tale in itself. When they interviewed me to find possible job matches, their system did not have a numeric level for my degree of education, experience or abilities. The guy just shrugged his shoulders and asked if I was interested in working in the interim as a night security guard, forklift truck driver or in a telephone call centre!!! As they used to say, flocking incredible. One email application later, I had a job (splendidly well paid) which was much to my interest, back in Mexico! I am now in my fourteenth year in said job, speaks reams.

On another note, I have often mentioned to family and friends who are in Uni and thinking about entering the workforce, it is now a global job market. Languages are a must! Why vegetate in good old Blighty when you can do the job you want anywhere in the world for much better wages and job package.

Rgds.
Dave

Fred Olsen renewed his merchant fleet by new builds from Japan and Korea yet he owned H&W. If you owned Tesco why would you shop in Lidl?....

Short answer to the reason for H&W going to the wall...the land was worth more than the shipyard. 350 acres of prime real estate slap bang in the centre of Belfast. New apartments, office blocks and hotels springing up all the time...if you bought a riverside apartment for £1 million would you want a noisy dirty shipyard next door? I think we know the answer.

I would buy an apartment for £1 million but I suspect Barclaycard would be seriously pissed off about it. :big_tongue:

Modern yards have done away with 14 & 28 lb sledge hammers, the noisiest item in the yard is the laser.
One must not get stuck in the era of the Arrol Gantry, the Riveting Gangs and the Red Leaders; Block construction is the future. I'd buy an apartment adjacent to H&W just for the view and to catch snippets of the workers witty repartee at lunchtimes. An education in itself.

Take you to have good ears ES as there are none of "oul hands" left to spread the banter. :(

Harland and Wolff will NEVER die as an entity, to do that they have to kill the name and it will never be forgotten in Belfast. :very_sad:

H&W taught me a trade, gave me a livelihood and a lifetime of memories, good and bad but most of all it turned a boy into a man able to stand his corner in the world and for that I am eternally thankful. :smoking:

Who owns the big yellow cranes, Samson & Goliath? Is it H&W or Belfast Harbour Commissioners or Belfast Corporation?
What is their likely fate, as I'm sure their upkeep is a costly item?
There is another crane at H&W, much older than Sampson & Goliath which is much more evocative of the years of building warships, tankers and cargo ships, will it be preserved? I think it should.

Goliath perhaps.........................or just dry wit surfacing!

When Swan Hunters in Wallsend met the same fate a few years ago, almost all of the Cranes (Including the old floating crane Titan), Floating Dry Dock and much of the machinery and tools were sold to an Indian Shipyard by the receivers.

ES The cranes belong to H&W but are considered as listed monuments by the Department of Culture and Leisure which means they cannot be disposed off without government approval.

the maintenance cost as at 2018 is £230,000 per crane and each crane is repainted in alternate years, Samson one year Goliath the next but whether the DCAl can fund this remains a question to be answered. Two of the old steam driven cranes are rebuilt and preserved at the Folk and Transport Museum and will be on display sometime next year, or so I am told. The giant floating crane was sold about 12 years ago and was subsequently scrapped.

Hope that info is useful.

I have just read a very informative article on Save The Royal Navy website documenting the potential impact to the RN (and general shipbuilding) of the potential loss of H&W as a shipbuilder, the article can be found here

One fact I hadn't realised (in the article) was that....."H&W were central to the British consortium bidding to build the Fleet Solid Support ship. Boris Johnson has appointed Anne-Marie Trevelyn MP as the new Defence Procurement Minister. She is a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Shipbuilding which advocates that the FSS be built in the UK and not open to foreign competition. In her brief tenure as Defence Secretary, Penny Mordaunt also advocated “buying British” and there is appears to be political momentum to ensure the FSS is built in a UK yard."

The optimist in me says all may not be lost - it seems there are some damned good reason for retaining H&W as a shipbuilder according to the report, considering H&W are supplying BAE Systems with parts for the new Dreadnought submarines (as well as owning the UKs largest dry dock - which is big enough to take QE / PoW) - there is also much political interest, and of course so much potential for future New Builds of warships/auxiliaries in the very near future.

One lives in hope that this is a success story, my home town of Wallsend turned into a ghost town when Swan Hunters finally closed the doors in 2006.

We cannot support shipbuilding industry on RN/RFA requirements alone unless we are to rebuild the Grande Fleet. How would we successfully entice merchant owners to build in them?

(Perhaps some other bread and butter work - why not housing built on the block principle? Grand Designs rather than Grand Fleet).

I don't think the report (or myself) is suggesting that we go back to having an enormous fleet at all David, just trying point out that the procurement authority needs to have a choice of suppliers when they go out to tender....without needing to go shopping abroad.

From what I have read - on Monday, there were only 3 shipyards left in the UK that were capable of building warships (other than the Carrier Alliance), today...only 2 remain, one of them is BAE up in Scotland (likely to have a monopoly on all warship builds if the current trend continues), the other is Camel Lairds here on the Wirral - who have not built a complete warship in decades and are now laying men off - I'd say that was critical!

If they can build warships - they can also build merchant ships, however I agree that getting the price to be competitive whilst winning sufficient orders from the shipping companies is a significant challenge - particularly when you have to compete with Far Eastern builders that drive down the price by having huge economies of scale.

Tom, of course I get that - Governments should not spend outside the family unless they have to. But you cannot expect any industry to standby for your exclusive business when commercial conditions make it impossible to have a market outside that very limited customer base (in reality, one).

I still think there is mileage in trying to build something else with the same technology. Houses, after all, should be watertight and had mine been built in blocks and hoisted onto site it might be. Unfortunately it isn't but that is another story.

To say the far east has achieved superiority simply by economy of scale is not really the driver. How do you build scale unless you are trading up. It is the cost of labour that allowed that. The one thing that the West could not have controlled (could we have had an underclass of workers unable to support themselves because of the risen living expectations of their neighbours? Wait, perhaps there is mileage in that. Import the workers, like the NHS and care industry. I fear that would do nothing for our reputation for the product, which like many others posting was an achievement of the trades rather than the management and direction).

I agree with the points you have made David, all valid, however if anyone in Government had followed up on any of the recommendations in Sir John Parkers National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSbS) published just a couple of years ago, we wouldn't be in this dire situation we are today (incidentally he was an apprentice and in the design team at H&W in the 60's and has a wealth of shipyard and manufacturing experience - unlike many of the goons holding political power and influence at the moment).

As the report states...."The sorry state of the industry rather makes a mockery of the central premise of the NSbS that would see work distributed across the UK and sustained by a drumbeat of orders and exports"

The NSbS was received by those in the industry with acclaim and much hope, however - as is normally the case, his carefully thought out strategy for the future of shipbuilding in the UK has been sidelined by those in power, I can only assume because it would need cash investment and some serious long term strategic planning on behalf of HMG, instead of the reactive short term stuff that currently occurs.

Your last point (importing labour similar to the NHS) is also quite pertinent to this situation - many of the welders here in Camel Lairds have come over from the EU, a similar situation also exists at BAE in Scotland - who would have thought that we would have needed to import welders in order to manufacture a very small selection of ships!

If I may drop a different pebble into the pool of discussion, ships built in the Far East also benefitted from the low cost of the basic raw material, produced locally with heavy government subsidies. British yards using British Steel were on a loser before they even factored in the cost of labour.

Another good point for the mix Roy - its looking bleaker!

I may take up the thread again if I can get (and understand) the NSbS document. I really can't understand how GB could have challenged other European yards without it being a European 'captive' trade. A von Jones act?

(Thanks PM Tom, all much appreciated)

David, the NSbS was been published by HMG here in 2016, although I agree that its not an easy read, it does make 34 clear recommendations, of which almost all have been 'accepted' by HMG (whatever that means in political circles), however although they were accepted - I think very few have been actioned, which is likely a contributory factor in the sad loss of 2 UK shipyards in the same week.

I think that the Global Combat Ship (Type 26/31e) programmes future export success is one of the positive signs that the NSbS strategy could help UK shipbuilders export both ships and designs overseas, however I think it may have come too late to save some of the Shipyards identified as suppliers in the programme (Appledore, H&W and Fergusons).

Either way we look at it - as you state, any competition in the EU is difficult and skewed, due to many of those competitors enjoying state subsidies (Navantia Spain, DCN France and yards in Italy) to keep the yards in operation when times are tough....certainly not a level playing field for struggling UK yards.

Perhaps partial nationalisation may be the only way to save what little is left of UK shipbuilding - before its gone forever as Bob stated earlier, but it would need to be a better model than the last time (for example yards were not allowed to compete with each other for work and the Naval yards were not allowed to diversify by building Merchant ships).

Assuming that what you say is true, have you any idea why the British government does not make available similar state subsidies for British shipbuilders? Whose fault is it that only the British yards are not supported?

I don't understand (successive) Government policy on shipyard subsidies either Ron, undoubtedly the blame resides partly with them. According to the Save the Royal Navy website:
"Government is very reluctant to offer aid or intervention in failing industries that cannot be all be propped up indefinitely - but if nothing is done there will be further decreasing options when building ships in the future"
Who knows what it will take before they are forced to step in and save what is left of this once great industry?

Gents,

If I remember correctly, it was during the Thatcher governement that the British government took a "bung" to stop building ships in the UK and to eliminate any subsidies, even though France, Germany and Italy continued with subsidized building.

It is important to remember that governments do not run companies to make a profit (nationalized industries). It is only the dedicated capitalists/industrialists who can do that and, if it doesn't work, cut their losses.

Rgds.
Dave

Thatcher and her 'lame duck' philosophy with no thought whatsoever for the well being and strategical situation of the country. Once these things and skills are lost, you can't just open a cupboard and re-instate them.

The 'service' economy was all that mattered which means people will flip burgers or work in a retail park. Nothing wrong with this work, but for a country of 60 million that has to import fuel/food/and now trains/ships/know how this will sooner or later lead us to the down side of Mr Micawber's principle, if it hasn't already.

Bob,

I completely agree. As I said in a previous post, I went back to the UK in 2001 to take a decent position, with an agreement to serve at least five years. After that was over (2006), there was nothing there for me and nothing on a decent, make that comparable to expat, wage and conditions. It was good bye Blighty and I have never looked back since then.

Sad, but that is reality. I could go on about the deterioration of other things in the UK but won't.

Best Regards,
Dave

Dave,

I agree, this is not the same country that I was brought into by my old man!

For the record - moving abroad to work/live is an incredibly brave thing to do, sounds like your happy there, so it was obviously the right move.

I moved to Sweden for a few years for similar reasons - after doing depressing contract work for the MOD procurement people - However I made the mistake of coming back when the project was paused awaiting funding, whilst living in Stockholm, I was able to see the UK from a totally different perspective....and I wasn't impressed with what I seen! The Brexit fiasco has just cemented that view into my mind and I am now wishing that I had of stayed there!

Tom

Tom,
Quite true.......I just did not fit in anymore! There are two types of "Wallaseyans", those that stay, and get nowhere, or those that leave! To be perfectly objective, IF you have certain skills/experience, they are not appreciated in UK. Upon returning, I remeber two comments, one in the company where I worked: "Oh, so you claim to be a real engineer!: and another (from a plumber that installed paint systems at auto plants),"So, you're an engineer, like me! But then again, I'm a company director!". Yeah, mate, we're the same...........

I had come from an 81M USD contract where I had been tasked with finishing the entire project in twelve months. It was already in comissioning in ten months. This was with an Italo-Argentinian company. I built a bridge, I replanned civil works, I worked in the field planning very complex and difficult heavy lifts, I got stuck into electrics, instrumentation and power distribution. If I didn't know, I damn well found out quick. I also did a stint in Pittsburgh as a furnace specialist when an engineer came down with appendicitis and then peritonitis!

Lessons learned? Of course! Back in the UK, it was a case of endless tutting,"Ooh! we don't do things like that here!" (a-la Kenneth Williams). Various projects that utilized the wrong technology (known to the company) and lost money - Except for mine, where, because of "forward thinking", not only by me but my other two operative colleagues (other personages on the outer bounds!), we made good money for the company. In part, and because my face didn't fit, I was offered fixing projects (after successfully completing a 24M EUR project for St. Gobain in Spain which had been abandoned), but Iran, Siberia and Reading were not my cup of tea and I left. I was immediately offered a job in Newport for a steel plant, a good job, three year duration and high status, but, for the sake of my family, Mexico beckoned again. That last offer was from an international company that knew of me first hand (They had audited us on the 81M project).

Where I now work, my profile and abilities were a perfect fit, albeit a fourth change of country in six years. I now cover from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego and act as a specialist consultant on a worldwide basis. However, the paint is never dry and who knows where I will be in a year's time!


Rgds.
Dave