Hi Crab
I'm not sure why you think the "taking things at risk" issue has much depth to it as far as the SAR-H bid is concerned....you might elaborate
In my experience, -yes the majority of the risk for the performance and delivery of SAR-H will fall to the chosen contractor - that's what its all about after all....but that said I can assure you that it will be in the nature of the solution that some risk will remain firmly managed in the hands of the Customer (read IPT if you wish here).
As for bamboozling - I can assure you that the SAR-H IPT, including its MoD servcie members (who represent those front line pink bodies of course!) and HMCG representaives are not easily bamboozled especially after their experience with the Interim process (and remember SAR-H is a much bigger and longer term project than the Interim which was not a PFI either. Even if any of the bidders were so minded to do some bamboozling - a foolish move in such a competion where if nothing else the costs of any bamboozlement will soon show up on their balance sheet - assuming it got through the extensive scrutinies in the first place. You know yourself I think how extensive the customer analysis team is for the bids, and how the Treasury and both Departments' PFI units will go into enormous depth before the contract is signed off...in fact there is a real risk that such scrutiny will cause extensive delays as in other similar sized recent PFIs such as FSTA (the only broadly equivalent PFI to SAR-H). In fact in this sort of PFI, the bidders' banks are also very much to the fore in ensuring no nonesense survives to reach the customer - its their money after all that is on the line here. No one wants to replicate Metronet - where the whole thing went bankrupt not long after contract and left HMG carrying the debt.
I think you already know my views on where we should have been with a future UK SAR Force - but PFI is where we are and lets hope it delivers - its unlikely we will see an alternative in these cash strapped days.