Competent Politicians are well aware that they're not experts on everything and hence hire domain experts to help them understand those domains and actually make informed decisions about them.

Mind you, I suspect this specifically is more a side effect of the profound problems with Dishonesty and Cronyism that the UK has: basically they tackled drought as a negative perception of the Government problem, so set up a talk group to project the impression that the Government was doing something about it and chose as head of it (and to be well paid for it) somebody whose greatest qualification for it was being their mate, all of which is very typically in British power circles.

The natural consequence of such things is them producing fancy press releases which look absolutelly moronic for domain experts, but since most of the people who read such releases are not domain experts, that's usually fine and in fact advances the true purpose of that "group" (managing perceptions).

Even with the Tech Press internationally picking this up and making fun of it, since the very same people who play these power games over there also control the local Press, they might very well get away in Britain itself with a press release with even such a moronic idea as this, as it will be spinned to make them look good.

tape storage is for offline storage, and any data storage on it would also be redundant

writing and reading tape archives takes a lot of computing. usually you have your tape library server and a server hosting the app and then the tape sled. tape takes a lot of energy

so deleting it electronically is going to take a more energy

it's more efficient to overwrite it or use a degaussing device to wipe the tape

That's for backups. You wouldn't have it as the only storage method because it's so inconvenient to get the data.