They still need the hangar to do the maintenance.They just don't want the resposibility and obligations that come with employing large quantities of highly skilled employees.
They will probably keep training apprentices as they are quite signifcantly cheaper than LAMES. They will probably even increase the rate in future as there is likely to be very little training opportunites for them so turnover will be high.
There are some big changes in the air for QF engineering with the potential to seriously undermine the company if handled poorly. I get the impression they are not going to have too much trouble in filling the rumoured upcoming redundancies.