Tyneside-based precision engineering specialist Express Group has secured about £1 million worth of work producing components for the Royal Navy’s Astute submarines — one of the UK’s largest defence projects.

The company, which will use new machinery in a specially created clean manufacturing cell for the project, has been selected by Rolls-Royce to join its FastMake initiative (established to improve the performance of the build programme).

The contract will run for the next 12 months, but it is hoped that a strong performance will lead to work on the next generation of nuclear submarines — the 20-year Dreadnought project.

Gary Thirlwell, Express Engineering’s managing director, said: “Securing this contract has given us a major boost, as we seek to win more work outside the depressed oil and gas sector. It demonstrates the diversity of our team, which has had to adapt extremely quickly to meet new demands.

“What is probably most pleasing is the fact that we have been able to do so while providing parts of the highest quality. To date, there have been no defects whatsoever; moreover, we have reduced lead times on delivery to about a fifth of what they were earlier.”

Matt Anderson, head of manufacturing (submarines) at Rolls-Royce, said: “FastMake is an initiative created to speed up the manufacturing process. We have bought factory capacity with Express Engineering, where a dedicated cell
involving our own engineers is working to ensure that standards are maintained.

“This means we can reduce lead times from several weeks to a few days.”