So, The Ministry of Defence today announced that RAF St Athan is to be the new Joint Forces Training Centre for the Royal Navy, RAF and Army. I’m really pleased for them. No, really I am. It’s 5000 new jobs and £58 million annually to the local economy. Does that mean that some of my work colleagues (who live in or near St Athan village
Covered by the BBC, their report says:
He said the Metrix Consortium won contracts to provide services at St Athan near Cardiff and HMS Sultan, Gosport.
The first of two packages under the deal will see training for 6,500 personnel transferred to the two sites over five years from 2008.
Again, this is great news. HMS Sultan is a few miles down the road from me and is always a potential employer. I work for the MoD right now. The announcement doesn’t mention whether Sultan will stay MoD or if Metrix will take over the whole site. Flagship training are already running part of the site, I believe, running the Royal Naval Air Engineering and Survival School. The rest of the site is dedicated to the Royal Naval School of Marine Engineering.
What the BBC’s report doesn’t mention is the future of our area’s other big training establishment, HMS Collingwood. Collingwood is home to the Maritime Warfare School (fecking big guns). Worryingly, the first Google link for HMS Collingwood returns a “Page Not Found” error. Think they’re trying to tell us something? You can find more about Collingwood at this link.
