Report: UK tentative on Eurofighter
By Alex Stevenson
Britain may be considering backing out of its commitments to the Eurofighter project, it was reported today.
According to the Financial Times newspaper, officials from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) will meet with Treasury counterparts to discuss the potential cost of abandoning the third tranche of the fighter planes.
The government currently owes a £1.45 billion payment to its partners in the Eurofighter, Germany, Spain and Italy.
And pressure is building from critics that going ahead with the purchase of more of the multi-role combat aircraft will prove costly and unnecessary.
But defence firm BAE Systems has said the project is worth £2 billion and breaking maintenance and upgrade deals with the firm would be expensive to the MoD.
An estimated 40,000 UK jobs are reliant on the Eurofighter, whose second tranche has already had to be adapted to fit in with Britain’s operational requirements in Afghanistan.
The MoD has said negotiations are currently ongoing about third tranche aircraft.
“Further discussion will be required before all nations are able to make an announcement on the way ahead,” a spokesperson said.
With pressure on public spending likely to increase in the next decade many fear the Eurofighter will be scrapped in order to save costs.
“We’re getting too much air power,” former defence chief of staff General Sir Mike Jackson told parliamentarians on April 28th.
“Eurofighter’s a superb aircraft – but it is designed to shoot down MiG 29s over German airspace,” he added.
“If we have to cut our cloth, inevitably that will be one area that people will look at.”
Formal agreement for the development of the Eurofighter aircraft was originally reached in 1988. Contracts for the first batch of 148 aircraft – 48 of which were for the RAF – were signed ten years later.
