Sending someone out loan when they have a year left on their deal is usually reserved for the players you're done with and can't sell, so just trying to ride out their contract.
The fact that we did the exact same thing with Hastie and got burned makes this more infuriating. Now, it turned out Hastie was shite, but thats hindsight.
There's no guarantees, look at maguire, but this is probably the area where we can take more risks, with the worst case being you have a backup player.