Everything to do with infrastructure is a shambles, but to be fair on our lords and masters, they do know about it and agree that it is a shambles. The trouble is there is practically nothing they can do about infra since responsibility for it was taken away from the three services and vested in DIO, which is in the luxurious position of owning none of the reputational risk that its inadequacy creates. "Army housing in poor condition", "RAF runway late and over budget" etc. Never "DIO". There was much talk a few years ago about the services 'taking back control' (to coin a phrase) of their infra, but it's seemingly come to naught as all the potential work-arounds to DIO's uselessness currently fall foul of policies owned by.... yes, DIO.
To be even more fair, it's not just Defence that suffers this BS. The council round our way has been trying for over 20 years to get a moderately-sized infra project done. Four years ago the council leader got so fed up with the continual delays for re-costings, tendering and other BS that he truncated the process against the commercial officers' advice and finally had the bloody thing built. The bill came in 33% overspent. This was duly seized upon by the local press, expecting the politician to be pilloried, but far from it - he's been showered with praise from all sides. The public view appears to be that the cost would have escalated by a similar amount over the last four years whether the thing was being built or not, so the money being set aside over the next couple of years to pay back the overspend would probably have been spent on the project anyway. Nice to see some bold action from a politician!
Last edited by Easy Street; 7th Nov 2018 at 22:41.