The striking public sector workers who genuinely deserve a pay rise

The Royal Fleet Auxiliary, the grey-painted fleet of civilian-manned ships that supports the Royal Navy, has gone on strike again for the third time since 15 August. The visible part of this has been in the Cammell Laird shipyard, a stone’s throw across the Mersey from the Labour Party conference.

“Fair pay for RFA” reads the banner. The RFA has suffered pay cuts of 30 per cent in real terms since 2010. The 4.5 per cent raise they were offered in November was below inflation. Even the regular armed forces, who didn’t do well compared to other public sector workers recently, were given 6 per cent.

Almost nobody outside the RFA and the RN has even noticed the RFA strike action, or even the fact that there’s a dispute happening. The eternal problem with maritime issues in this sea-blind island nation is getting anyone to notice, much less care. The doctors’ strike caught the headlines. The rail workers’ strikes were closely followed. Yes, we all need health care and transport – but we also need energy, data and cargo both in and out bound, and almost all of that goes by sea.

If you can’t get NHS health care, you can go private. If the trains stop running there are other ways to get where you’re going.

If the RFA stops working, our warships cannot refuel or resupply at sea, and therefore cannot operate at range from the UK. There is no way to assure the flow of trade, energy and communications on which this country depends. The RFA have more right than almost anyone to be called “key workers”: and yet this group of public sector employees is almost completely ignored.

This is where we are now. The RFA today has just 13 ships, the bare minimum needed to support our cruelly shrunken navy: but it has the people to operate only six. Eroding pay compared to normal merchant fleet employers has driven RFA sailors and officers away for decades: those who remain are being overworked and bounced around between ships depending on priorities, making the outflow worse. The pay gap between RFA work and similar jobs in merchant shipping is massive, and RFA sailors have full civilian qualifications. Commercial companies know this and are actively headhunting. The RFA will soon be picked clean.

This would not be an expensive problem to fix: we are not talking about a lot of people and they are not paid a lot. The pay bill for the entire RFA in 2023 was £92 million, or 0.17 per cent of defence expenditure for the year. Paying them the ‘missing’ 30 per cent that would match the market rate would take the total to £120 million. We’re talking about a few per cent of one per cent of defence spending, and defence spending is tiny compared to what we pay for the NHS, or benefits, or what we will pay for our nationalised train drivers.

As ever, it’s not only about pay. The RFA ethos is a mixture of Royal Navy and Merchant Navy. RFA sailors are proud to serve their country and they respect the RN, but are protective of their independence from it. A ‘lack of respect’ from the Royal Navy features in almost every private discussion with them. Another issue is that more and more the RFA is being asked to do jobs that were formerly done by the RN.

As an example, for a long time, the RFA has been required to operate amphibious ships intended to deliver our Royal Marines and supporting forces to hostile shores. Until relatively recently, however, there were also amphibs in the RN. The idea was that the first landings would be conducted by the RN, and the RFA would only follow on when at least some shoreline was relatively secure.

But the helicopter landing ship HMS Ocean was retired without replacement, and the RN landing dock ships Albion and Bulwark have long been mothballed without crews – and without realistic near term prospects of being crewed. The only operational amphibs have been the RFA’s Bay class, and the aged RFA Argus. These ships, barely armed at best, have frequently been expected to operate as “littoral response groups” in dangerous parts of the world without any support from the RN.

Similarly, the RN is currently engaged in running down its once world-class minehunter flotilla – a jewel in its crown, one of the few things Britain did comprehensively better than the USA – and replacing it with sea and underwater drones operated from RFA “motherships” inexpensively bought in from the offshore industry. The first mothership has been procured, but its crane – its only means of launching drones – is broken and there are no RFA sailors available to operate it in any case. Again, it seems strange that in future we will send RFA civilians to deal with dangerous minefields and the RN will wait until all is made safe for them.

The sailors and officers of the RFA understand that they may be required to run risks, but they don’t appreciate the RN simply handing over some of its combat tasks to them completely, especially when this is quite obviously being done to save money rather than for any other reason.

Then there was the recent plan to remove the service head – the Commodore of the RFA. That post was replaced with a non-uniformed civil servant called the Deputy Director Afloat Support (DDAfSup). This might sound unimportant but these things matter to a uniformed service, sometimes more than they should, but they do. That this decision has just been reversed reflects how the current leadership has realised it needs to put its arms around the RFA – and not just on pay.

There are other significant hurdles to clear alongside the pay issue. The lack of a solid stores support ship for our aircraft carriers is the most obvious. RFA Fort Victoria, the only solid support ship we have, is laid up and unlikely to return to service even if a crew could be found for her. As a result, we’ve had to ask for help: next year’s carrier strike group deployment to the Far East will include Norwegian replenishment ship HNoMS Maud.

‘International by design’ is an excellent thing. ‘International by necessity’ is a very different proposition.

The three replacements for Fort Victoria are a long way off and getting further away all the time. The problem is that there is only one real working shipyard left in Britain that can build big ships from scratch. That shipyard, in Glasgow, is fully occupied trying to replace the RN’s ancient, worn-out frigates and has no capacity to spare.

In a burst of sanity we actually acknowledged this reality when we were procuring our new RFA tankers, the Tide class: these were built in South Korea to a British design and the project was a success, though we can’t crew all of them. If we were smart we’d do the same again – but we aren’t smart.

Instead we did what we nearly always do in British defence procurement: tried to have a job creation scheme as well as some kit. The moribund Harland & Wolff yard in Belfast, which hadn’t built a ship in decades, was included in the project to build the new solid support ships. Despite its new government revenue stream, it now seems that Harland & Wolff will collapse anyway: how the solid support project will deal with this remains to be seen. Suffice it to say this is unlikely to mean we get the ships sooner or cheaper.

This is a strategic shortcoming that directly affects our ability to act as a blue water navy: and again, even if we had a way to get the ships quickly, at the moment we couldn’t crew them. The RFA is completely without any spare people: RFA Cardigan Bay recently returned to the UK for a refit but this has not commenced because there are no sailors even to move her from Portland round to Falmouth.

Meanwhile, the ships that are at sea are being overworked and we know how this ends. In 2017 the US Navy had four collisions and groundings, with fatalities. These were largely attributed to rapid personnel churn, lack of command experience and crew fatigue.

I don’t want to tempt fate but one can easily imagine the six working ships of the RFA are heading down that road. Rumours are now emerging of the USNS Big Horn running aground off the coast of Oman and taking on water. The Big Horn is a civilian crewed tanker of the US Military Sealift Command – the US equivalent of an RFA. American colleagues make it clear that their relationship with the US Navy is as delicate as the RFA’s has been with the RN. Likewise, their hulls are ageing and not being replaced quickly enough. They have personnel problems too even though their sailors are paid well, showing that money is never the only issue.

It’s a stretch at this point to say what has happened to the Big Horn can be attributed to overwork but I would not be surprised if that features somewhere in the report in due course. One thing is for sure, she is the only tanker in the US Fifth Fleet area of responsibility – that is, the Middle East – and now they have to find one from elsewhere, making use of allied and alongside resources in the meantime. Even the USA finds itself stretched sometimes.

Back in the UK, the Royal Navy currently finds itself suffering from four major issues: lack of frigates and destroyers; lack of working attack submarines and strained nuclear sub infrastructure generally; major shortages of its own RN people; and the RFA issues outlined here.

Of these four problems, the RFA is the one with the least clear route out of it. Frigate and submarine availability is set to improve, painfully slowly, but the graphs are clear. ‘Recruit and retain’ looks set to improve, helped by the Defence Secretary’s announcement yesterday that he will lift some of the absurd bureaucracy that was bringing recruitment to a standstill. Incidentally, this is not a lowering of standards, it’s a removal of barriers to otherwise excellent people being able to join. It will actually improve the standard of our people.

For the RFA situation to improve some bold decisions are required. Hopefully, this will be an integral part of the ongoing Defence Review, not that we have to wait for that to understand the problem. But none of this works without enough people. Step one of digging the RFA out of this hole is to stop the exodus by improving their pay. If we can afford to pay doctors and train drivers more, we certainly afford this.

The question now is whether or not the government means what it says: or whether in fact it believes that only some classes of public sector worker deserve to be paid properly.

Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer