From: RustyBullethole, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Times 9.8.00
Parting shot for weapons firm
BY MICHAEL EVANS, DEFENCE EDITOR
BRITAIN'S last surviving smallarms factory is doomed
to close despite an appeal yesterday for a job-saving
Ministry of Defence contract.
The Royal Ordnance plant in Nottingham, whose
production lines have been running since the end of the
Second World War, is expected to get only a small share
of the L80 million contract to modify 200,000 British Army
SA80 rifles, with the bulk of the work going to a factory
in Germany. Jack Dromey, national organiser of the
Transport and General Workers' Union, urged Geoffrey Hoon,
the Defence Secretary, to ensure that the Nottingham plant
received enough of the work to safeguard it for three years.
The modifications on the SA80 rifle are to be
carried out by a Heckler & Koch factory in Oberndorf,
near Stuttgart, although some of the assembly work could
be handed to the Nottingham plant, which employs 400
people.
The MoD expects that the programme to put right
all the defects that have been highlighted after years
of complaints by soldiers will take about six years. The
prime contractor for the SA80 project, BAE Systems, owns
Royal Ordnance and Heckler & Koch and intends to hand
the work to the German factory because it is already
"tooled up".
Under present plans, by the time the first 22,000
modified SA80 rifles are handed back to the MoD at the
end of next year, the Royal Ordnance factory in
Nottingham will be closed. The 400 workers include 60
employees of Heckler & Koch who staff a small facility
on the Royal Ordnance site.
BAE sources said that even if some of the SA80
work were given to Nottingham, it would be carried out
by the Heckler & Koch staff. The sources said the
factory would close because it was suffering from a
serious shortage of orders.
--
Although tooling up to make 40ft rifle barrels did seem
a strange expenditure.
I cannot see why RO cannot be given the work to make
the new barrels. And frankly, if it's all going to
be done in Germany and the tooling is already there,
surely it would make more sense to simply replace
the SA80 with the G36?
Steve.
Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org
List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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