There's currently a fair amount of MPs who are calling for defence spending to be increased, and there's currently a Defence Review in progress ... I think some politicans and senior officers are hoping that they might get a bigger chunk of cash soon and are therefore keen to upscale their projects (such as T31) in the hopes of procuring some capable platforms (unlike with a £250m per ship price tag!).
However, ever the pessimist, I think the upcoming Defence review will be another capability slash, based primarily on saving money, not capability (as always). I never understand how the UK can spend so much on defence and still come up short in comparison with other nations with less to spend but apparently more capable platforms.
T31 is another project that the Govermment can use to say to the clueless general public that we've got X amount of ships on x amount of tasks ... because they know the average joe won't see past the number of hulls, while the armed forces are hollowed-out. The Conservatives used to be the party of Defence but recently I'm not sure they can back that up!
we are in the same boat over here in Norway, among the Scandinavian countrys we use more money on our military, but get very little out of it. Just for a couple days ago, the military wanted to park all tanks, due to lack of funding for ammunition... and now, suddenly they managed to get some money. we us $7.2 billion (1.62%), but struggle to keep the Navy running with just 15 ships and some coast guard ships, our P3 Orions, can't fly, just a few F16 are ready for anything, Army are running on savings, some of our stockpiles are empty, we are falling behind on service, and we lack long range AA-defence and can only afford to protect one air-force base, so they want to close the strategic important Andøya base some are an NATO ready base and USA love to use it for there P8 poseidon (according to government it's to expensive to upgrade the base for P8's, instead they want to build a new base... it's apparently cheaper)
Government (economic) and military (economic) are two things that should not be mixed!