Royal Navy reduced to five operational frigates after HMS Iron Duke withdrawal

HMS Iron Duke has been withdrawn from active service, leaving the Royal Navy with just five operational Type 23 frigates, naval analysis website NavyLookout has revealed.

The ship has been stripped of weapons and sensors and has not been to sea since October 2024, with no formal decommissioning announcement made despite her effective removal from the fleet.

The withdrawal comes less than three years after a £103 million refit that took 49 months and more than 1.7 million man-hours, and was described as the most complex ever carried out on a Type 23. Iron Duke had been laid up in Portsmouth since 2017 and arrived at Devonport in such poor condition that the structural work on her hull was almost twice what had been needed on any previous ship in the class.

Iron Duke was in active service as recently as October 2024, when she and her Wildcat helicopter from 825 Naval Air Squadron spent three days tracking the Russian Kilo-class submarine Novorossiysk and her support tug through the English Channel near Ushant before handing over to a NATO partner as the vessels moved into the North Sea. Armed Forces Minister Al Carns said at the time that Russian vessels had been passing through the Channel more frequently and that the Navy was watching around the clock.

The Ministry of Defence scrapped a plan to fit Iron Duke with a Type 2087 towed array sonar from a decommissioning sister ship. Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard confirmed in a written answer that after a comprehensive assessment, “the platform’s remaining service life, the time required to complete the conversion, and competing operational priorities, the benefits of proceeding did not justify the additional cost or extended period out of service,” with resources re-prioritised elsewhere.

The Type 23 fleet has been shrinking steadily as ships reach the end of their service lives, leaving the Royal Navy in an increasingly stretched position ahead of the Type 26 City-class frigates entering service. Five of the eight Type 26s now have steel cut, with HMS Glasgow and HMS Cardiff both fitting out at BAE Systems’ Scotstoun yard. HMS Belfast, Birmingham and Sheffield are at earlier stages of construction at Govan. At Babcock’s Rosyth shipyard, four of the five Type 31 Inspiration-class frigates now have steel cut. HMS Venturer, the lead ship, has floated off and is currently fitting out, with HMS Active having also completed her float-off. HMS Formidable is under construction, and steel was cut on HMS Bulldog earlier this year. Keel laying for the fifth ship, HMS Campbeltown, is expected later this year. That puts at least eight frigates currently in build across Scotland simultaneously, a shipbuilding effort not seen in the UK for decades.

Beyond those five Type 26s, HMS Newcastle, Edinburgh and London are still to have their keels laid and assembly to begin, with the programme targeting completion of all eight hulls by the mid-2030s and the build interval between ships reducing from 18 months to 12 months as the programme gathers pace.