To clarify, I do not believe any of this is the fault of the academics who were operating on shoestring budgets before the pandemic became the big issue that it

To clarify, I do not believe any of this is the fault of the academics who were operating on shoestring budgets before the pandemic became the big issue that it now is (edit: unless they wilfully misrepresented their capabilities I suppose). I do think however that the government, with several months of advance warning that this issue could become very important and having demonstrably identified key advisors including those academics, failed to provide more than a shoestring budget to upgrade the capabilities of their expert team in such an obvious way at a much earlier stage. I'm also curious about why they brought in the people they did to do whatever cleaning up was done before publishing this code. There are several businesses in the UK that do this kind of work as a major part of their activity in one way or another. Current or former staff with that sort of background would have been the obvious people to tap for assistance. To the best of my knowledge, the people who have actually been identified as having helped have no such specialist background.