What Richards was actually trying to do was kick the (QEC/F35) can down the road for a few years so that trying to start the carrier programme again from scratch would have been too expensive. Not least because there wouldn't be a "harrier" replacement aircraft.
Job done, cap badges saved, trebles all round.
The CVS is not an ideal compromise for the Harrier because it was never designed specifically to operate it. Any new design with a CVS-type TAG was shown by every single operational analysis study done from the earliest days of the programme as being not capable of delivering worthwhile effect against what it was being asked to do. A new ship design would not have been proportionally cheaper than QEC either, although the cost added by various VSO (of which Richards is the last in a long line) bleating about size would probably not have occurred.
And before anyone starts, while the current assumption for QNLZ & PoW is to have a squadron of 12 f/w aboard, that is not a physical limit, which is what a CVS style ship would have been.