I think the orders speak for themselves in terms of cost, specification and quality - the AVENTRA isn't winning these orders because it's built in Derby but that's a massive positive vs. importing them. 99.9% of people don't care where the trains are made, so long as they get them from A to B on time, but that doesn't make the benefit to the UK economy any less real. Agree that the 800 is totally overplayed in terms of the 'Made in Britain' angle.
A friend of mine worked in the public sector in the past.
A lot of the tenders ended up being wrote in a very specific way and more often than not a lot of local companies won these tenders, despite the fact that some of the winners of these tenders would have very little experience or a track record in the industry that they were tendering for, yet won the tenders over established and well recognized providers.
Most of the winning tenderer parties had trouble delivering their product either on time or on budget and many of those who did had serious issues in the short and long term with the products or services that they provided. It helped the local economy and some people made a fair whack out of it, but the products and services ultimately had to be soon replaced as they were not fit for purpose.
If the quality of your product isn't good it has to be replaced more quickly or costs more to operate or is more unreliable, this means any short term benefit of an economic boost is slowly eroded away over the life of the product because of the increased costs. In these cases it often would have been better to have just gone for the better product wherever it was from day one.
I'm not saying that Bombardier don't have a clue what they are doing, I'm sure that they do, but you need to have a proper competitive rolling stock market in order to keep the bidders honest, keep quality levels up and keep prices down, seeing all the orders going to the same parties is only going to drag that in a downward fashion since realistically a rolling stock market needs a presence like Siemens/Alstom since they are the one manufacturer who can realistically challenge and keep Bombardier on it's toes.
Although I guess nobody cares about the long term since on the current form they'll be scrapped after less than 20 years anyway.