Astute subs did have flaws, says admiral

The head of the Royal Navy's submarine programme has told the Guardian that his team discovered design faults, technical problems and flaws in the construction of the multibillion-pound Astute class boats, but said he was still confident it would enter service on time next year.

In a frank interview in which he spoke in detail for the first time about the challenges of launching the submarines, Admiral Simon Lister also admitted the military should not have boasted about the boats' top speed.

It was not unusual, he said, for the first of a class to be "a difficult birth", but he added that the Astute was now the most tested boat in the navy. Lister insisted that lessons were being learned and that changes were already being made to Astute's sister boats, which are due to come into service over the next decade.

He said he was feeding these modifications into the blueprints now on the drawing board for the submarines, dubbed Successor, to carry the Trident replacement.

Lister said the problems on the Astute were being dealt with and safety had not been compromised. "I wish none of them had happened. I wish I could buy a submarine as if it was a Mercedes-Benz coming off the production line after 10 years of product development. It isn't that.

"What I would say is that the speed and the quality of the activity to put things right is second to none. The ambition to bring Astute into service in perfect order so that she is able to enter service within three months of exiting the shipyard, if anyone thinks that's possible, they would be mistaken. A nuclear submarine is a complex beast."

Lister said it would be wrong for the military to claim the difficulties were just "stuff and nonsense and teething troubles", but he said it would also be wrong for critics to write off what is the navy's most technically advanced boat.

The Ministry of Defence has ordered seven Astute hunter-killer submarines that will cost up to pounds 10bn and expects them to become the backbone of the fleet.

The programme has been hindered by delays and overspends since it was commissioned 15 years ago, and suffered embarrassment in 2010 when Astute was grounded off Scotland - a calamity that led to the commander being removed. Last month, the Guardian revealed that Astute, which is coming to the end of three years of sea trials, was forced into an emergency surfacing when it sprang a leak, suffered from internal corrosion, and been fitted with equipment and materials of the wrong quality.

Since then the Guardian has discovered new issues. The MoD has admitted to problems with the trays that carry important cables controlling Astute's sonar, which has led some of them to fray badly. During a recent test, Ambush - the second of the class and also built at BAE Systems in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria - flew its "Not Under Command" flag - which denotes that due to exceptional circumstances it is unable to manoeuvre properly.

Both boats are having to be equipped with an electronic chart system, after a report into the grounding of the Astute in 2010 ordered the upgrade.

Significantly, both have also suffered propulsion problems that have prevented them from reaching or exceeding the speed published by the MoD - 30 knots.

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