It is indeed a national disgrace, POBJOY, but the scandal is much much bigger than the loss of the ACO gliders! 'They' get away with it because the Establishment has banded together to ensure that the RAF VSO cover up holds. The ACO gliders were but the latest air fleet to suffer from the attack on the previously ring fenced Air Safety funds, which were diverted to compensate for massive losses sustained when new AMSO policies failed so spectacularly. The reason the Air Safety budgets were ring fenced is because once resources are withdrawn there is no way back. Airworthiness starts to haemorrhage in fleet after fleet until the swiss cheese holes all line up. They did so on the Mull in 1994 to Chinook ZD576 and in Afghanistan in 2006 to Nimrod XV230. These two fatal accidents alone killed all 43 occupants. Other airworthiness related air accidents have accounted for many other fatalities, including the Red's Sean Cunningham death in 2011. Mercifully there was no such accident in the ACO fleet, and remedial work has quickly restored airworthiness albeit to the civvy register and operator. Why couldn't that have been done whilst retaining them within the ACO? It could have been, but that would have raised questions of why they were unairworthy in the first place, which would have compromised the cover up and certain RAF VSO reputations.
The MOD will be quite relaxed about any grumbling staying within the Air Cadet Organisation. Their very first line of defence is to stove-pipe each accident, each example of unairworthiness. Indeed, airworthiness is rarely touched upon by BoI's/SI's, let alone the lack of it being identified. It took a bunch of civilians producing evidence to the respective Nimrod and Chinook Judicial Reviews to show that both the Chinook HC2 and Nimrod MR2 fleets were unairworthy at the time of their accidents. In reality it infects many other fleets and will go on doing so until Air Regulation and Accident Investigation is removed from the maw of the MOD and made truly independent of it and of each other.
Self Regulation Never Works and In Aviation It Kills!