When Lion-class battleships could have entered service

Would the planned Lion-class battleships have been fully worked up by late 1943 or 1944?

On a roughly three-year build cycle, the first ships could commission in 1942, and Royal Navy commissioning normally followed work-up rather than preceding it.

King George V provides a rough three- to three-and-a-half-year construction baseline for estimating the Lion program. Pairs laid down through 1939 and 1940 could plausibly enter service from early 1942 into early 1943 if wartime priorities did not interrupt them. The estimate assumes the Royal Navy normally completed trials and work-up before commissioning, unlike the German sequence. On that basis, commissioning would mean readiness to fight. Prince of Wales is identified as an exception, with Clarke blaming Churchill for premature commissioning. Destroyers alone would still face a serious disadvantage against heavier opponents, making the mixed force used at North Cape a preferable model.