The Nightingale hospitals were a vanity project from the start; a show, a riposte to China for building a new hospital in under a fortnight. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, could call a few staff from all over that massive country to run that new hospital, whereas the UK could not. Hospitals can be built in weeks but doctors and nurses need to be trained which takes years.
China also imposed travel restrictions, thereby containing their epidemic, leaving medical staff free to attend the major outbreaks. The UK didn’t even close its borders during the stay-at-home restrictions in Spring. That’s the UK Tory party Brexit faction, elected on a “control our borders” mandate, didn’t close the borders. We already knew because South Korea, who did massive testing and tracing from the start, told the world in mid March that there were more cases coming in through the airports than there was domestic transmission.