The Government has again confirmed that the New Medium Helicopter (NMH) programme is still awaiting ministerial sign-off, after a fresh round of parliamentary questions sought clarity on its timetable and status.
In an answer published on 25 November, Defence Minister Luke Pollard said officials are continuing to work through the NMH business case and that “a decision [will] be made shortly as part of the upcoming Defence Investment Plan.”
Earlier answers from September and June show the same pattern. In September, then Defence Minister Maria Eagle told MPs that NMH remained under consideration within the Strategic Defence Review and the forthcoming Defence Investment Plan, adding that the Ministry of Defence could not comment while the approval process was ongoing.
In June, she confirmed that the NMH competition launched in February 2024 would continue unchanged, with proposals to be evaluated through 2025.
The official position sits awkwardly with the state of the competition. NMH began as a three-way contest between Airbus (H175M), Leonardo (AW149) and Lockheed Martin/Sikorsky (S-70M Black Hawk). By mid-2024 both Airbus and Sikorsky had withdrawn, leaving Leonardo as the sole bidder. That development raised expectations of a straightforward selection process but instead contributed to growing uncertainty about the Government’s intentions.
In 2025 the programme was downgraded from “Green” to “Amber” in the Government’s Major Projects Portfolio, due to workforce shortages across delivery teams and ambiguity around the competition outcome. Leonardo has since warned publicly that its Yeovil factory, the UK’s last full-spectrum helicopter manufacturing site, may not survive without the NMH contract.
The programme aims to acquire up to 44 medium-lift helicopters to replace the RAF’s Puma HC2 fleet and consolidate several separate rotary-wing roles into a single, multi-mission aircraft. The ambition is to simplify logistics, training and sustainment while providing an aircraft that can be rapidly reconfigured for varied missions through an open-systems architecture. Beyond the aircraft themselves, NMH is designed to support a domestic industrial base, including a UK production line, training pipeline and long-term maintenance capability.
Despite the scale of the requirement and the repeated ministerial references to an imminent decision, no award has yet been made. Until the Defence Investment Plan is published, the future of the programme, and of the UK’s only remaining helicopter manufacturing plant, remains uncertain.
Article by ukdefencejournal.org.uk
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