The go-ahead was given yesterday for the construction of two 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers as big as the QE2, but the Royal Navy will have to wait until 2014 for the first one – two years behind previous projections.

Under government planning announced nearly ten years ago, the two new large aircraft carriers for the Navy were supposed to come into service in 2012 and 2015. The ageing and smaller carriers they are replacing, HMS Invincible, HMS Ark Royal, and HMS Illustrious, were to be taken out of service by 2013.

However, senior defence officials said the new in-service date for the first of the large carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth, was now expected to be 2014, and the second ship, HMS Prince of Wales,in 2016. In the past the Government insisted that the 2012 date for the first carrier was “nonnegotiable”.

The delay means that the current carriers will stay in service for longer to prevent a huge gap in the Armed Forces’ expeditionary capability.

The cost of the two carriers, each 931ft (283m) long and nine decks deep, has also risen. When the project was first announced, the cost was to be £2.9 billion for the two ships. Yesterday defence officials said that the new estimate was £3.9 billion.

The Government is also planning to spend more than £10 billion on 150 Joint Strike Fighters (JSF) for the carriers, replacing the Harrier. JSF is being developed by the United States and Britain. Each carrier will be equipped with 36 of them.

It was not clear from yesterday’s statement how the Ministry of Defence’s overall equipment programme will be affected, and whether some key projects will have to be scrapped to pay for the carriers.

The defence officials said it was still planned to build eight Type 45 destroyers, part of whose role will be to protect the carriers. Six have been ordered so far. Officials said the extra two ships were still included in planning assumptions.

The carrier programme will generate 10,000 jobs. All the components for the two ships will be built at British yards.

The long-awaited decision to go ahead with the two carriers, announced in the Commons by Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, followed negotiations with the Treasury over defence spending for the next three years. The settlement reached, as part of the Government’s comprehensive spending review, will result in the MoD’s budget rising by £7.7 billion over the next three years, the equivalent of a real-term, above-inflation increase of 1.5 per cent in each of the three years.

Although this rise is lower than the average settlement reached by other government departments, Mr Browne said it still represented a continuation of the “longest period of sustained real growth in planned defence spending since the 1980s”.

The MoD’s current budget is £33.4 billion. This will rise to £34 billion in 2008-09, £35.3 billion in 2009-10 and £36.9 billion in 2010-11. Mr Browne said the settlement meant it was possible to confirm orders for the two 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers, the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy.

The QE2 is 70,327 tonnes and is 963ft long. But the defence officials said that by the time the two carriers come out of service in about 40 years, they will probably be even heavier because of all the additional requirements that would be needed over the next four decades. It was also announced that all three Naval bases at Faslane on the Clyde, Portsmouth and Devonport would be kept open.

The MoD also plans to invest £550 million over the next three years in service accommodation.

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