Type 31 Frigate

Britain's cheap, fast-build frigate — the Type 31, or Inspiration-class — is a 5,700-tonne general-purpose warship designed to a deliberately fixed price (around £250 million a hull) on a proven Danish hull design. It commissions lightly armed for its size, but with the volume, power and growth margin to be up-gunned later. It is the Royal Navy's bet that more hulls and flexibility beat fewer, gold-plated ships — the affordable counterweight to the high-end Type 26.

Overview

The Type 31 (General Purpose Frigate / GPFF, named the Inspiration-class) is a multi-mission frigate built by Babcock International at Rosyth, based on the Arrowhead 140 design — itself derived from the Danish Iver Huitfeldt-class hull (an OMT design). Its founding principle is affordability and pace: a fixed-price, low-risk, exportable warship to grow Royal Navy hull numbers after decades of a shrinking fleet. As commissioned it carries a relatively light armament — a 57mm Bofors gun, two 40mm Bofors guns and the Sea Ceptor (CAMM) air-defence system — which has drawn criticism, but the design's real selling point is its large reserves of space, weight and power for future weapons and sensors. It is the "fitted for but not with" frigate: cheap and quick now, upgradeable later.

Development

The Type 31 emerged from the UK's 2015–2017 National Shipbuilding Strategy, which split the Royal Navy's frigate replacement into the high-end anti-submarine Type 26 and a cheaper general-purpose Type 31 to keep hull numbers up at lower cost. After a restarted competition, Babcock's Arrowhead 140 (with BMT and Thales) was selected in 2019, per Wikipedia. Five ships are being built at Rosyth — Venturer, Active, Formidable, Bulldog and Campbeltown — to a target build cost around £250 million each. The underlying Arrowhead 140 design has also been exported: Indonesia ordered two (the Merah Putih class) in 2021 and Poland three (the Miecznik / Wicher-class) in 2022, making it a genuine design-export success. The lead ship was launched in the mid-2020s, with the class entering service across the late 2020s.

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