How submarine building is powering jobs and skills in Barrow, UK

Walk down Barrow’s Abbey Road and the 60-metre-high walls of Devonshire Dock Hall rise above the Victorian terraces like a cathedral of steel. Inside, 14,500 people design and build the Royal Navy’s Astute, Dreadnought and SSN-AUKUS submarines – that’s about one-third of the town’s working-age residents. Average salaries stand at £39,000, well above Cumbria’s median of £29,900, and this spending power ripples through cafés, gyms and start-ups far beyond the dock gates.  

Evidence of the impact of BAE Systems is evident in other ways throughout the town. Team Barrow, a partnership between central government, Westmorland & Furness Council and BAE Systems, has already secured £220 million to overhaul housing, transport and public spaces over the next decade. A new University of Cumbria campus is rising beside the Submarines Academy for Skills & Knowledge and will deliver degrees in mechanical engineering, computer science and nursing, backed by BAE-funded scholarships. Meanwhile the derelict Portland Walk retail parade is being converted into training labs, a careers hub and an experiential learning centre that will pull thousands of trainees into the town centre each week.

Promoting skilled jobs

BAE Systems expects to hire a further 801 apprentices and graduates in Barrow for 2025, part of a national early-careers cohort of 2,400 that will take its UK training spend since 2020 beyond £1 billion. Each submarine platform pulls in 11,600 UK suppliers and supports an estimated 100,000 jobs nationwide.

The forthcoming university campus beside the shipyard in Barrow will give local students degree-level pathways that previously required relocation. BAE Systems has already agreed a bursary scheme that combines tuition support with paid summer placements and a guaranteed interview for graduates.

The wider impact

Each Barrow-built submarine represents a truly national endeavour: on average, over 11 600 UK suppliers contribute components and services to every vessel, generating a total supply-chain expenditure of around £7.5 billion across some 1,500 companies over the life of the Dreadnought programme. In Cumbria alone, more than 100 local firms – ranging from precision pipe-benders in Ulverston to specialist bakery suppliers for 24-hour shifts – share approximately £80 million of annual orders, sustaining around 1,380 jobs in the regional supply chain. Nationwide, these procurement flows support an estimated 100,000 jobs across multiple tiers:

• Tier 1 system integrators and OEMs anchor major contracts for propulsion, combat-management and life-support systems.
• Mid-caps in regions such as Yorkshire (gearboxes, steel castings) and the East Midlands (nuclear steam-raising plant, handling systems) supply critical subsystems.
• SMEs across the South West (sonar modules, communications arrays), the West Midlands (diesel generators, heat exchangers) and Scotland (periscopes, navigational masts) furnish specialised components engineered to meet stringent noise- and vibration-control requirements.

Oxford Economics’s analysis of BAE Systems Submarines’ national purchasing in 2020 showed that every £1 million spent by the shipyard supports 17 jobs in the wider economy, with multiplier effects in R&D-intensive supply chains and high-skill employment preserved well beyond Barrow’s docks. These figures underline how Barrow’s submarine programmes not only anchor local employment but also radiate prosperity through advanced manufacturing clusters and thousands of communities across the UK.

Across Europe the defence sector supported 581 000 direct jobs in 2023, an 8.9 percent year-on-year rise. Every €100 million invested in defence tends to add roughly €150 million to EU GDP because high-tech supply chains have strong multiplier effects. A recent RUSI study shows that defence hubs outside capital cities deliver above-average wages, significant STEM upskilling and enhanced social mobility in their local communities. 

Looking ahead  

With £1 billion of site upgrades and multi-decade submarine orders, Barrow’s industrial renaissance looks set to continue. The key challenge will be ensuring that housing, health and transport infrastructure keep pace with population growth – an issue the £220 million Team Barrow fund is designed to address. 

Defence spending can feel abstract in policy papers; in Barrow its impact is visible in classrooms, town-centre events and solar panels. For anyone curious about advanced manufacturing, community regeneration or green innovation, the town offers a living case study of how a defence company can become a catalyst for wider prosperity.

Source: BAE Systems, Our social and economic impact in Barrow-in-Furness.