So I say this as a software developer who on Saturday set up a database with a front end entry and reporting system capable of compiling and displaying data on every Scottish politician in a day -

Chronic underinvestment by UK Gov has left them incapable of implementing this.

With enormous, complex, and aging infrastructure like the British government chronic underinvestment for a decade builds up £billions worth of technical debt.

This debt, and the invasive and restrictive security needed to handle it makes swift software solutions impossible.

What should be literally a one-week job for a small team of software developers turns into months of frustrating, impossible, hoop-jumping and negotiations with dozens of other teams maintaining systems that went obsolete years ago but are kept on life support with no replacement

UK Gov literally didn't have the time, investment, or leadership to turn this around since the pandemic kicked off.

This isn't a Tory failure of the past few months. It's a Tory failure of an entire decade. They deliberately created this situation in the name of austerity.

That's why this catastrophic data meltdown has occurred around Covid-19 reporting.

Civil servants turned to excel because it was all they had. They mis-used it because they didn't know any better. No one knew better because there is simply no one to help them.

It was all they had because of austerity.
No one knew any better because of austerity.
No one could help them because of austerity.

Any software dev who claims "if they'd just have hired me I could have sorted it in a week" is off-base.

It might be because they've never had to work in that kind of environment or institution but, trust me here, no software developer can fix a decade of failures in a week.