Comment by owlbite

Having been involved in UK research labs before moving to industry, none of this surprises me. The government is more interested in short term headlines than long-term actually doing something.

They'd rather make capital investments (which aren't a recurring budget line, so the same money can make different headlines next year) than pay for the sort of ongoing spend on paying experts competitive salaries to actually build a real capacity.

Prior to Turing Institute there was the Hartree Centre, which was hobbled from hiring anyone significant by being tied to a non-technical civil-service payspine that struggled to approach even "competent" level salaries for these positions as the posts didn't manage 100s of minions.