At the risk of travelling old ground, PAYD was introduced at Luqa in 1974. You paid for everything, pat of butter, slice of bread etc but only at lunch. This then set the pattern that has existed in in all the RAF messes that I have visited since. Breakfast and Dinner are within the daily 'core' menu and lunch is at cost. True the livers-in still pay for the Friday night and Saturday/Sunday core that they do not eat.
But where confusion arises is the use of the phrase PAYD.
What we had from 1974 was OLD PAYD. What we have now is NEW PAYD. The two are chalk and cheese.
What we wanted was OLD PAYD where, as a liver-in, you did not pay for the 5 weekend meals that you might miss.
NEW PAYD is an entirely different beast. NEW PAYD is a Private Finance Initiative to provide bars, coffee shops, airmen's clubs, canteens, messing etc all within a capped profit margin.
This is then delivered not per unit but per group of units. The contractors are thus asked to bid for a group of units for the next N years and the liklihood that some of them will close in the next year or two or their populations will change drastically.
The reason for the hold is simply that no contractor would bid for a contract involving, say Leeming, when we do not know the future of RAF Leeming in the RAF ORBAT.
So remember NEW PAYD has b*gg*r all to do with allowing the squaddie not to pay for meals he does not eat and is everything to do with allowing the contractor to run coffee bars, feeders, etc.
Why not go the US route and let B*gg*r K*ng run a fast-food joint? Why not run a system, again US, where the core facility serves 'tea' from 5-6 but is then let to another group to run from say 7-10. The latter could serve food that people want when they want it and employ 'self-help' staff.
One problem of course is the minimum wage and income tax which would stop moonlighting at low wages.