Harland and Wolff site set to go into administration

The Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast is expected to go into administration on Monday.

Already 130 workers from the site at which the Titanic was built have been given redundancy notices.

Harland and Wolff Heavy Industries has struggled in recent years because of stiff competition from abroad and after the company’s owner Dolphin Drilling filed for bankruptcy in summer of 2018, putting the site up for sale.

"It seems increasingly unlikely that a solution will be found in the short term and the company may indeed have to go into administration," DUP MP Gavin Robinson told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme. "We've pulled all the political levers that we can."

An option considered by unions was the nationalisation of the shipyard. The proposal was backed by the Labour Party, but the government has said the crisis is "ultimately a commercial issue".

According to the Guardian, two potential buyers of the company have emerged but they are thought to be focused on a sale after an administration, MJM Group, a Newry-based company specialising in boat fit-outs, and Flacks Group, a US buyer of struggling firms.

Robinson said Harland and Wolff had asked the government for shortfall funding of £650,000 “so that they could explore other options".

He added: "The official advice is that it cannot be done for three reasons: there is no order book at present so the money would be going in with no generation of product or profit; and there was no ability to secure the loans or pay them back; and it would also conflict with state aid rules."

The yard, which now focuses on repair work on ships and oil rigs as well as wind turbines, made a loss of £5.8m in 2016, the last year for which it filed accounts.