Numbers affected
Biggus,
When in service, it was estimated that around 1,000-1,200 'equivalent heads' would be involved in operating and supporting the MRA4 - RAF, MOD, Industry (BAES as prime plus lots of OEMs and smaller suppliers). In the first years the RAF were covering some of the training and 'depth' maintenance - but only until operational routine and 'forward' demand had built up, with the full fleet in service. In any case, as you say, the pain is definitely shared out.
Down the chain you can easily double or treble the number of people involved part-time. It is difficult to know how many of these supply chain 'part-timers' will be badly hit, but to take away part of an organisation's throughput, yet leave all of the costs, generally means that someone goes, particularly against the overall backdrop of the other defence cuts. This is illustrated by the cross-platform support (e.g. engineers supporting say, MRA4, VC10, Sentry and R1) which is no longer viable without the other platforms say doubling their costs for the same throughput - or, more likley, leaving costs the same, making half the engineers redundant, and suffering the drop in support performance. Hence a further set of secondary staff are affected.
At time of cancellation, there was still the residual design, development and production teams, which added anothr 600 ish, destined to drop away, but progressively rather than in one fell swoop.
Hope this is of interest.