Why is the SESAR Joint Undertaking (SJU) wary of consultants?

OK, you may say that consultants have made a bad name for themselves and you would be partially right. In some industries some of them have and we all suffer the consequences to some degree. But on the other hand, many companies have found considerable cost savings in the use of consultants who will perform tasks that would otherwise cost a fortune… and this is true even if consultants are not cheap themselves.
But why is the SJU so diametrically opposed to the use of consultants that they have told everyone, the airlines and their associations included, right at the beginning and have repeated it many times since, that they may not use consultants to represent them in the SESAR tasks?
You may say the following is conjecture but it is logical and the only reasonable explanation of a totally unreasonable attitude on the part of the SJU.
When the airline industry first faced what was to become a series of financial crises, including the effects of 9/11, they responded by cutting costs across the board. This translated also into reducing their staff engaged in attending to activities like air traffic management. All of a sudden airline representatives all but disappeared from EUROCONTROL meetings and the airspace user influence on ATM developments was automatically reduced to fire fighting and some shouting on the policy level… with predictably meager results.
When SESAR came along, the airline industry was suddenly faced with the opportunity of a lifetime to improve things… except that they lacked the knowledgeable manpower to represent them on an H24 basis. There were of course excellent airline experts still around and those were promptly brought onto the firing line but almost none of them were all-round experts who were at home equally in airline and ATM operations.

To make sure that the airspace user case could be argued in terms that were also firmly in place from an ATM perspective, the airlines brought in a number of consultants who could do just that.
This was the end of meetings where the airline demands were routinely dismissed with comments like “oh, that is for the birds” and the reluctant non-airspace user stakeholders had to face up to the new realities of the SESAR definition phase.

Those new realities led to considerable frustration and not a few incredible situations. That, in the heat of a discussion, one of the consultants was called stupid by a young ANSP expert was simply amusing (and to the credit of the administration concerned he was promptly pulled off from their team). But when writing of the CONOPS was slowing down as a result of the consultants’ insistence that it contain more than just a repeat of basically legacy solutions, the “other side” was really pissed and things tended to go downhill from there on.
It is now a matter of historical record that the SESAR Concept of Operations, as finally published, contained all the advanced elements that the airspace users wanted in there even if some of those elements were written up in a watered down version but with the essence still very much untouched. Not exactly the outcome some people intended…
Once the SESAR definition phase was concluded and the SESAR Joint Undertaking was set up, the airline contribution to SESAR was put on a different footing.
The first rule: NO CONSULTANTS!
I do not believe for a moment that the SJU on its own would have had a problem with the airlines continuing to use consultants. They knew full well that the airspace user community did not have in house all the expertise needed.
But the SJU is not its own master and I have no doubt at all that they were told in no uncertain terms by the long suffering “other side” that they did not want to have any more interference from people who knew both sides of the business. It is much easier to tell an airline ops expert that he is wrong in his views on ATM than to shout down somebody who knows exactly what a controller is doing.
Of course one should also ask the question: why are the airlines allowing the SJU (and by proxy the ANSPs) to dictate the terms of their contribution to SESAR? After all, it is airspace user money that is being disbursed in SESAR so why should the airlines not do whatever they want to make sure their contribution has the best impact possible?
The only explanation I can offer is that for some reason the airlines have not (yet) realized why they should be taking a harder stand on this. It is one thing to sit in a performance partnership and quite another to lie down and let other side dictate the terms and accept them even if they are detrimental to the airspace user cause.
Of course, like in everything, there is an exception to the rule. General aviation was allowed to field a consultant. Apparently they are considered harmless enough…