It's like this: the bureaucrats (who know they have jobs for life and aren't spending their own money) have lots and lots of meetings, mainly to justify their own existance, and eventually write a spec document that is literally 10s of thousands of pages long. They then give this to Accenture or EDS who are about the only companies on the planet who have enough spare staff to even read it.

Then they say, OK, we can do this, and it will cost that much. Any changes however to this spec will cost THAT much.

The bureaucrats say OK and work starts, then they realize that they need to make a whole slew of changes, since they didn't really know what they were doing in these meetings, none of them has ever worked in the NHS, they went straight from Oxbridge to the Civil Service Management Fast Track. But, whatever, it's only taxpayer's money, and Accenture did take us golfing that time.

So it goes. Fix is easy: any civil servant who overspends is dismissed with no severance and no pension. Then you'll see their interests aligned with ours.