The Royal Navy • Cost and affordability of carriers, CVF, CVS and Victorious rebuild

I've been thinking about how one could reasonably compare the cost of ships, each built over several years and separated by decades and came up with the idea of comparing them to UK GDP at the time of the build. 

I'm assuming that, unless I can find something specific, the costs are actual money spent (outturn cost) so I compare that to the average of GDP in the year work started and the year the ship commissioned. In the case of HMS Invincible (R05), Hansard provided the outturn cost of £175m and a calculation at 1981 prices so I used that as a cross check and the numbers came out quite close.

In summary:

HMS Victorious rebuild from 1950 to 1957 cost £30M, equating to about 15.1 hours of UK GDP.
HMS Invincible build from 1973 to 1980 cost £175M, equating to 9 hours, using Hansard's 1981 price of £330M gives 10 hours and a price of £300M estimated for follow-on ships. 
The combined CVF programme from 2009 to 2019 cost £6.1B equating to 13.9 hours each.

So roughly speaking the two CVF represent about the same share of national resources as the three CVS and each a bit less than modernising HMS Victorious (no wonder they gave up on the idea of doing the other armoured carriers!)

statistics: Posted by Nathan — 3:49 PM - 1 day ago — Replies 3 — Views 77

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