How much of that £250k would have been spent anyway? It works out at about 2 Puma flying hours per day for the period, at a reasonable guesstimate or £6k/hour, which sounds like a reasonable training rate to me. Accommodation provided by the Swiss, so free or at least cheap, fuel, engineering etc would have been paid for anyway, and they won't have been on LSSA as, IIRC, you need to do more than 30 days for that.
So what's actually happened is that 33 have used some of their annual allocation of training hours - which, yes, are expensive - to do quality training, and had fun in between. How can any sane person have a problem with that?
BCH