Ok, having watched this with interest over the past few days, I was at a meeting in Town where a member of the DEC community made a comment which planted a seed.
Playing devil's advocate - what if it were to be suggested that the lack of rotary has less to do with the Govt refusing to fund / deploy them and more to do with MOD internal management?
At the end of the day, there is a finite pot of cash for Defence; some of that will go on salaries, some of that will go on maintaining infrastructure etc and some of that will go on procurement. What the element of funding earmarked for procurement and equipment development is spent on is down to the capability managers, scrutineers and various heads of capability right the way up to the respective heads of service. Is it not the responsibility of capability managers and heads of capability to argue their corners and fight for the necessary funding to ensure their capability is both qualitatively and quantitatively sufficient for the tasks the sharp-end are being asked to perform? If the requirement is pressing enough, and a robust enough case is presented, then funding could/should/might be able to be taken from other capabilities that are less pressing in the current circumstances.
Following this line of argument to its logical conclusion, is the lack of rotary assets in theatre not down to a failure of the capability managers up to heads of service to argue their cases robustly enough, as well as the MOD's complete inability to manage its budgets and procurement strategies to ensure that finite funding lines are not squandered?
Or should we just take the view that the principle of collective responsibility runs throughout Govt, and therefore, as SoS Defence is part of that Govt, then the Govt as a whole is responsible for the abject failure to address the NAO BH audit report findings in a meaningful manner?