Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what estimate he has made of the number of nuclear marine engineers the defence industry will require over the next twenty years.

The Ministry of Defence is undertaking work to understand better the skills required by the Defence Nuclear Enterprise, including the requirement for Nuclear Suitably Qualified and Experienced Personnel. In addition, the Department, the Royal Navy and defence industry partners are members of the Nuclear Skills Strategy Group, which works collaboratively across the Defence and civil nuclear sectors to optimise nuclear skills for the future. As part of this work a Nuclear Workforce Assessment is completed; the most recent was published in 2017 and is available at the following link:

https://www.nssguk.com/media/1316/publication-nuclear-workforce-2017-exe-summary.pdf