4 year?! It’s really high time this franchise was tendered. Normally there are restrictions on how many times/how long you can award a particular contract without rendering under public procurement rules.
Since we are apparently not allowed to mention your agenda here, perhaps you could explain why it is that GW operations should have been retendered by means of a franchise contest at this point?
Since the last completed GW contest, there have been two for the East Coast. In both cases it has ended in tears with the government taking back the keys, despite this being the one franchise out of the whole lot that really ought to be a licence to print money - nice simple operational model, with limited-stop fast trains whizzing up and down between London, Yorkshire, the North East and Scotland, and a near-captive target market.
The factors affecting the GW area in the past decade are well known, with electrification and resignalling, wholesale changes to rolling stock and so on.
It has then run into the Williams Report, which is widely expected to come up with an alternative model for operating passenger services, so something had to be done to ensure continued GW operations, whether you like it or not.
And as a testbed for a new approach, I would suggest that what is arguably the single most complicated franchise area of all, encompassing everything from London suburban services, via long-distance expresses, to lightly-used rural branch lines, with a sleeper service on top, is about the last place to start trying out that new model - whoever the existing operator may be and whatever anyone's opinions of the said company may be.