ALF
I suspect we're talking about slightly different things. I'm referring to the Service led process whereby the inability to operate in accordance with the Statement of Operating Intent and Usage is considered by what I know as the Constraints Assessment / Working Groups (chaired by your DEC branch, for each aircraft Mark). Constraints are classified Critical, Major or Minor; with "Safety" appended if necessary. This determines procurement priorities and is the forum at which Front Line can best influence procurement decisions.
DEC is obliged to run requirements for all Criticals. (In practice, Majors and Minors seldom succeed, unless they can be subsumed within the solution for a Critical). This is what prioritises his annual workload. It is during this process that "temporal" may be appended; that is, the reasonable time it takes between identification of the risk and successful mitigation. If DEC's bid fails, then "temporal" must be removed and the risk is not ALARP. At this point, the Secy of State (theoretically) personally owns the risk and he must accept this in writing. This is where I believe the MAA's main role is. Clearly, the original Tornado CWS mitigation failed, so the risk cannot be said to be ALARP. It may be they got round this by "resetting" the risk when they decided to resurrect CWS a couple of years ago. But that would hide the underlying problem, which would seem to be a failure to do anything for 20 years.
If the "issue" is not considered to be a Constraint, then it is a Limitation; and enters the RTS as such. Hence the relationship to the Safety Case and Airworthiness.
Given the background explained by Distant Voice, clearly the lack of CWS has been tagged as a Critical Constraint for well over 25 years, because funding has been endorsed - witness the successful Tornado trials of the early 90s. Had it been a Limitation, no such funding would be available and, by definition, the risk could never be ALARP, temporal or otherwise, without significant changes to the SOIU and all that this entails. The bottom line is that in the early 90s the trials report said "ready to go", yet post-Moray Firth (July 2012) MoD claimed lack of CWS was not a factor because it could never have been in the aircraft in 2012. THAT, I think, is the basic contradiction that concerns Distant Voice. What happened between the early 90s and 2012?
I accept that, almost inevitably, terms will have been changed regularly over the years, but the basic process remains the same. Let us agree on that. The last CAG/CWGs I went to referred to them as Operational Constraints and Limitations. Ultimately, their role is to assist getting the Operational Commander the tools necessary for his task; for example, an airworthy aircraft. Then he can make his Fitness for Purpose (operational) decision. Hence, attaining Airworthiness precedes Fitness for Purpose. We already know the difference isn't really taught in MoD (see XV179 Inquest).