Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon heralded “a new era for Portsmouth as well as its Naval Base” as he officially opened the new shipbuilding facility which VT Group claim is “among the most advanced naval shipbuilding yards in the world.”

The £50 million scheme is expected to yield productivity improvements of up to 20 per cent through increased levels of automation in both the fabrication of component parts and in the construction process itself.

VT are in the process of closing their yard at Woolston in Southampton, which should shut its gates in March. Up to 1,000 skilled personnel have relocated along the South Coast in the move.

One of the first tasks for the new facility will be to build blocks of the new Type 45 destroyers for the Royal Navy, but there is still potential for expansion on the 33-acre site, and VT have an eye to building large blocks for the future carrier programme.

There will still be capacity for the yard to handle work for overseas navies.

The new yard consists of two newly-built large assembly halls, 130 metres in length, with associated workshops and ancillary buildings having been refurbished from existing property.

One of the buildings, the Ship Assembly Hall, is 42 metres high, is where final assembly of the ship will take place, using units which have been fabricated from decks, panels and bulkheads in the adjacent Unit Construction Hall, which is ten metres lower.

The project has involved extending a quay wall by seven metres, and filling in Dry Dock 13 with around 100,000 tonnes of marine dredged material to provide the floor of the Ship Assembly Hall.

There is at least one dry dock on site that can be used specifically for ship outfitting.

Workshops throughout the site are linked by fibre optic cables to VT’s computer aided design areas, enabling data to be sent electronically.

The Steel Production Hall on site allows the cutting of 13m x 3m steel plates and the profiling of 13 metre steel bars using laser and plasma cutters.

Much of the equipment is new, but a major logistics operation was mounted to transfer machinery from Woolston – including a steel plate rolling machine which is more than 100 years old.

One of the benefits of the new facility is that ship sections are built on a level floor rather than an inclined slipway, and with space to expand – Phase 2 of the development should see the Ship Assembly Hall extended by a further 70 metres, and if VT get major work on the future carrier, a third shipbuilding bay of 190 metres could be built on the current Dry Dock 12, which would also be filled in.

VT Shipbuilding is one of two divisions of VT Group, the other being VT Support Services. Together they employ more than 10,000 people, with turnover of around £600 million.