Rolls Royce investment 'good news' for County
THE Caithness workforce at Vulcan could benefit from a £1.1 billion investment being made by the UK Government in Rolls-Royce marine facilities in Derby.
That was said this week by local MP John Thurso who described the Ministry of Defence announcement as "good news" for the county.
He said: "The Vulcan workforce is a major component of Rolls-Royce’s engineering capability in this field. Safeguarding the Derby facility will, undoubtedly, benefit the long-term work prospects for Vulcan. This is good news for Caithness."
The Liberal Democrat MP pointed out Vulcan has a highly-skilled workforce of around 300 and stressed that, in principle, these jobs will be maintained by Roll-Royce after Vulcan is decommissioned. John Thurso was speaking after defence secretary Philip Hammond told the House of Commons about the £1.1bn investment.
Mr Hammond claimed the contract will secure hundreds of highly skilled jobs for UK industry and retain the country’s sovereign nuclear capability. The funding will be used to produce new reactor cores for the next generation of the UK’s nuclear-armed submarines and is part of a plan to replace the Vanguard fleet which carries Trident nuclear missiles.
Britain’s nuclear weapons system consists of four Royal Navy submarines based at Faslane. The vessels can deploy Trident ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads.
The SNP is opposed to the plan as it does not want "weapons of mass destruction" in Scottish waters.
The MoD said replacing the existing infrastructure at Rolls-Royce with state-of-the-art nuclear reactor core production facilities would cost about £500 million. A further £600m will be spent on producing new reactor cores for the Astute and Successor-class submarines.
The John O’Groat Journal contacted Rolls-Royce for a comment about what the contract could mean for staff at Vulcan but was unable to get a response by the time we went to press.