Passport to freedom

Passports, or more accurately where they are made has been in the news a lot lately. Printing company De La Rue (traditional English name?) got it's nose all bent out of shape because the Government has awarded the contract to print the new "blue" passports (post-Brexit) to a French company. The argument around this contract seems to me to be a perfect metaphor for the whole Brexit argument and will almost certainly end up with ordinary people losing money and the country being worse off. 

Lets look at the facts.

It seems to me that the objectors (see tweet below) main argument is that passports should be made in the country that they are issued for, i.e. the UK passport should be made by a UK company. The flaw in this position is that De La Rue make passports for many different countries (and banknotes) so are we saying that they need to give up this business so that native companies can start to make their own passports, surely we should practise what we preach?

Then there is the issue of price, the French company bid was £120 million pounds less (over 10 years) than that of De La Rue. Many claim that if De La Rue lose this contract then they may have to make redundancies and that would end up costing us more than the apparent savings. It's worth noting  that De La Rue is a large company, this activity is only part of their business, see some numbers below (2017):

Turnover: £480M (this contract is worth £40M per year)

Operating Profit: £70M

Employees: 3,151(100 work in the passport division)

Highest Paid Director: £900k

Profit per employee: £18k

As a businessman (as opposed to a patriot) I have to ask, 

- You are the incumbent supplier

- Your home market

- Know the customer

- Know the job

- Bid 20% too high

Who's to blame?

Prior to De La Rue, the company 3M (not a UK company) used to make passports, presumably De La Rue offered a better deal at the time than them in order to secure the current contract? Isn't this exactly the kind of "free-market" scenario that Brexiters wanted?

I would ideally love to see this business being awarded to a UK company and our passports made here. I would like to see a UK company becoming the pre-eminent supplier of all passports world-wide because of unbeatable quality and price. I can guarantee (British Leyland anyone?) that we're not going to get there by presenting a closed-shop to the outside world and allowing our own companies to overbid and fleece the taxpayers.