Whilst the RAF will have offered opinion on the aircraft for the contract (because they were asked to by MCA), I don't believe the basing decisions were made by anyone in the military - that would have been a job for CHC and MCA.
The SAR experts have been asked to vet and score the SARH bids and it is now up to the committee who I think are mainly civil servants and MCA, not RAF, to make the decisions. Sadly there seem to be some members of the committee who think they know more about SAR than the SAR experts (the inevitable intellectual arrogance that comes with elevated position and rank) so they may well f**k the whole contract up anyway.