Sécurité Civile have 23 bases and are supplemented by the Gendarmie fleet. It's the sort of organisation you have if your SRR is not much bigger than your land area and you have quite a number of major SAR hotspots. I am not detecting an appetite at the MCA for 23+ bases. There is also a much greater emphasis on patient treatment in UK SAR than in some other territories.
As for the cheapest bid, well Draken and Airbus, like others, will not get an opportunity to be the cheapest bid at final tender if they do not demonstrate in the earlier stages that they have a technically more than adequate, and preferably innovatively progressive, solution. The MCA are not laying this out on a plate this time. Nobody knows going in exactly what boxes they have to tick. There is probably a lot of making your own boxes. Anyone who has picked too many accountants and MBAs for their bid team instead of lineys and posh hoverers with imagination and ambitious SAR ethos may not perform well in the environment that I expect the new process to create.