It's well known that the seat covers on the 397s haven't stood up to heavy use and are in the process of being replaced as required but replacing the material en masse with moquette has been shelved for now. The 802s are getting fully recovered seats with moquette paid for I believe by Hitachi.
Id love to know the details of some of these build and maintain train contracts.
You'd think that replacing worn out things would be included in a maintain contract. If they've worn out before expected then they was under specced. Especially if TPE can show passenger numbers / miles to be less or equal to expectations.
I work in a PFI building and everything is on a lifecycle and gets replaced after X amount of time... if it needs it or not. Some of the waste is astounding.
The problem comes when things wear out before it was foreseen. Our FM takes a pretty hardline and says not our problem replace it. But it has lead to some squabbles.
Other problems have come with things like fluorescent tubes not being available so the fittings needing to be replaced with LEDs.