Britain's shipyards could be forced to share construction of the Royal Navy's two future aircraft carriers with French competitors under cost-saving proposals being considered by the Ministry of Defence.
A final decision to place the £3.8bn order, already delayed from last year, is now unlikely before October or November while French suggestions for a 40% slice of the work are examined in detail.
France has already paid a £100m share of design and demonstration costs for the UK project to allow it to build a carrier for its own navy.
This vessel would have 90% commonality with the British warships, leading to proposals that overall production costs could be cut by as much as £200m by "worksharing" construction with French yards at St Nazaire and Brest.
Under one option seen by The Herald, BAE's Govan and Scotstoun yards would build two "superblock" sections of the carriers for the Royal Navy and one for the French, giving the Clyde a bigger share of the overall three-ship order.
But Rosyth, which has no recent experience of large-scale construction, and Barrow, the UK's specialist submarine yard, would lose their planned building roles in the contract.
Their "superblocks" would go instead to the French yards owned by Aker and DCN and to VT's yard at Portsmouth.
Rosyth, run by Babcock, would be likely for political reasons to retain the final assembly of the various sections of the 65,000-tonne carriers and their post-construction outfitting. The Fife yard is in Gordon Brown's constituency and has the UK's only drydock capable of handling the huge task of joining up the ship's separate sections.
There are suggestions that a further bonus might be that the carriers could eventually be based there because their sheer size would create navigational problems if either Plymouth or Portsmouth were designated as their home port.
The French are also understood to have offered to build two of the three complete hulls on the basis that this could save up to £500m through economies of scale.
Although this would be attractive to the cash-strapped MoD, sources say it would be "political suicide" for a UK government eager to preserve jobs and votes.
The MoD has also been involved in tough negotiations with Britain's warship builders since last year to try to force them to rationalise their operations to create a viable strategic "UK ShipCo" to handle future domestic naval orders.
Denis Ranque, the chief executive of France's Thales defence consortium, confirmed that his company had submitted a proposal to the MoD with the backing of the French government for merging the separate national projects into a single three-ship programme.
He said: "Building the ships together would be in the best interests of British and French taxpayers."
Under this approach, French yards would build one-third of the hull for each ship, with British yards building the other two-thirds. Potential savings are estimated at up to £80m per carrier.
The MoD says that while it remains "committed to the future carrier programme", it is "considering all industrial proposals" and that the final go-ahead is still being negotiated.
A naval source said yesterday: "We had hoped that the order would have been placed by now. There was an expectation that Gordon Brown would announce it soon after he takes over at No 10 later this month.
"It would appear that any announcement will now be delayed until late autumn when the Treasury's comprehensive spending review is finalised and Whitehall budgets set for the next four or five years.
"The defence equipment budget is already under massive pressure because of the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan. We need to start seeing steel being cut and orders placed. The carriers are central to the RN's future as a credible, world-class force."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article