Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, pursuant to the Answer of 18 January 2021 to Question 135843, what the optimal delivery rate is for the Type 26 programme.

The delivery rate for vessel acceptance for all classes of ship is planned to be the optimum that can be achieved considering all relevant factors. On current plans, the average delivery rate for vessel acceptance from the Contractor of Type 26 Batch 1 is one ship every 18 months, while that for Type 31 is contracted as one ship approximately every eight-12 months. For both classes the time between the delivery of successive ships is not constant across the whole of the class.