All,
I once heard, from a reliable source, that in an ideal world all larger airlines would have at least a small trickle of cadets coming through a training system of their own. The point to this is that the company(s) have a training system in place so that, come any pilot shortage, they can relieve to problem to some extent (look at what easyJet are having to do at the moment).
Feeding the system with a small number of cadets constantly keeps the structure in place for periods where larger numbers need to be trained. Seems sensible to me, considering the fact that cadets do not cost much/any more than DEP's in the long run IMHO.
Cuban_8