It beats me as to why, with all the "east side", "west side" and formerly Merseytravel Pacers under their belt for the first time in the Pacers' lives (The regions were pretty thoroughly divided in Regional Railways NW and NE days) that Northern weren't contracted to do a refurbishment to the same level as ATW have, on all their 142s early on in the franchise. We would then have one standard and decent quality interior across all their fleet. It seems a tad ridiculous that there are still a sizeable number of 142s in service with their original bus bench seating, when you would rarely expect to find such seating on an actual bus these days!
The problem is, the longer that Northern put off a refurbishment the closer we are getting to the theoretical 2020 withdrawal date for these units and the bigger the excuse for Northern to simply not bother as it's not worth forking out for a refurb on units with no more than 5-10 years of life in them.