Nigel
What you say roughly aligns with my brain dump. The £250k sounds like the NRCs I talk of. Perhaps Min(DP) got his words muddled and this means the initial contract is for seven aircraft? 250 + (7x50) = 600.
"Design Incorporation” is always fraught with difficulty, mainly because so many in the MoD regard it as a “waste of money”, so very often it is ignored. There is no doubt it is an expensive business and, as the a/c fleets reduce in size, so it takes up a higher proportion of funding. (As maintaining the build standard is not volume related – it costs the same if you have one a/c or 100. Very few realise this, so blithely accept proportional cuts in support funding when, in fact, it is jeopardising airworthiness and safety in general). The compromise is often that a high cost programme will be asked to consolidate the build standard (or more likely discover they have no choice). The inherent risk is that if something happens in the interim, the airworthiness audit trail is fragmented. It is a vicious circle and the longer you wait, the more corporate memory both industry and MoD lose, and the more it costs to catch up.
The problem is well known, and a good example can be read at
http://www.publications.parliament.u.../300/30005.htm Read “conclusions”, from para 22. What MoD told the committee is, in places, absolute rubbish, and we cringed with embarrassment when the report was published. As ever, the committee almost got it right, but didn’t truly understand the issues so MoD was able to fob them off. Equally, some of CDP’s answers put the MoD in a bad light when the truth would have made both he and MoD look good!