You need to remember that ASC is Government owned, by the department of finance to be exact and the Minister of finance, like his former colleague, the former Minister of defence, is not a fan of ASC and actively gags the company. The government also installed Navantia to run things on the project meaning ASC has even less control and authority than they had before.
Believe it or not this is nothing new, the Government wanted to divest themselves of ASTA in the 80s and would interfere down to preparation of bids etc. for example when the government own facility that had been instructed to bid for work came in at a better price than the tenderer the government wanted to win ASTA were instructed to increase their price. Earlier than that, well aware of the issues with the design of the tail structure on the GAF Nomad the project team designed a T tail version that fixed the problem and improved performance, the minister of the day was asked in parliament if this new version was being worked on and he said no, it didn't exist, resulting the scraping of the almost complete prototype and the destruction of records to cover the minsters backside.
Stuff like this is why I have a pretty low opinion of many politicians and despair at how they run companies that could easily be world leaders if the political classes had more brains, better business acumen and were willing to let the experts do their jobs without politically inspired interference.