Are Royal Navy ships as ship shape as they should be?

What is equipment ‘cannibalisation’?
Cannibalisation of machine parts, in maintenance of mechanical or electronic systems with interchangeable parts, refers to the practice of removing parts or subsystems necessary for repair from another similar device.

Cannibalisation on the rise
Equipment ‘cannibalisation’ has increased over the past five years by 49% percent, the NAO investigation discovered.

The MoD said that parts were only swapped when it was “absolutely necessary”.

Currently, the Royal Navy’s fleet has 19 frigates, destroyers and seven attack submarines. However, the shortage of essential parts sometimes prevents them from going to sea.

A spending watchdog from the NAO found that in 2016 alone, there were 795 instances of spare parts being taken from other vessels. There were 3,230 instances overall between 2012 and 2017.

Why cannibalisation has become more common
Official guidance stated that cannibalisation should only happen when no other solution is available.

However, the NAO said that delays in deliveries of spares and a lack of information about when parts will be available contributed to the increase in the practice.

In some circumstances,cannibalisation can be the most effective way to keep vessels at sea, such as in high intensity operations.

The NAO said the MoD had taken decisions to cut support, which could have created the problem of cannibalisation.

Some parts were taken from submarines while they were still being developed, which added to delays in the production process, which further led to costing the taxpayer millions of pounds.

A Royal Navy spokesman said: "Less than 0.5% of parts we use come from swapping components, and we only do this when it's absolutely necessary to get ships out of port and back on to operations more quickly.

"We continue to make improvements to how we manage this long-established practice."