What a waste

Until council officers are held responsible for their actions when managing the public purse, nothing will change.
I've said it before, from lack of control of contractors to excessive sick pay policy and everything in between, this is one of the reasons we have a poor and expensive service in most areas.

LOL a couple of examples the Council were building several new childrens centres, you would think several buildings for the same purpose would be the same design.
No everyone was different, in some the children were relegated to one small area that was smaller than the managers office.

One I worked on the manager turned up on site 2 weeks after the contractors started and after the footings had been put in with a new design she'd agreed with the architect, and yes it was a different footprint so all that work was wasted.
When we were looking to fit out I went down with a network installer and designed an appropriate setup, she tried to cut corners by asking for requotes with single points instead of doubles etc, She was told it would only save about £5 per point but she insisted a few months later when the building was in use she asked about getting the points turned to doubles and could not believe the quote was over £2,000 "but they were only £5 each !" yes but that was when they were running cables and now they are working above ceilings etc.

As the build progressed this one site was massively over budget and getting worse, She was summoned to a meeting with some senior managers, Finance people etc and representatives for the contractors etc. She was told in no uncertain terms that any further spend had to be agreed with the finance person in overall charge of the project, and that she had to follow the council procurement policies. As we came out of the meeting a member of staff gave her a document to sign and said "that's the order for they toys you wanted". She promptly signed it and handed it back. The Finance officer asked for the document took one look at it and ripped it up and said "we just told you no more spending and that was for £10,000 of specialist toys".

When I turned up to commission the network I could see a lot of flashing lights in the comms cabinet ( which should have been empty )
it turned out the Architect had told her she needed broadband and such and she had asked him to provide a router, switches etc, none of which were compatible with the main system without a lot of work, so I removed them, and reported up the line. 

In over 30 years I only ever knew of one officer being held accountable, he was found to have accepted bribes from contractors to help them with contracts.

This applies to any large organisation - not just councils or public bodies. Large private companies also have huge waste but you don't hear about it because noone really cares outside the company concerned.

In my view the problem is most people care less about other people's money than their own and large organisations are very difficult to make efficient.

where i live its 3£ an hour for on street parking from 8am to 6pm.. from 6pm to 8.30pm its then a flat rate of 2£ ... needless to say its dead during the day.

that of course should have been an immediate sackable offence: gross misconduct. But the public sector works by different rules from the private. 

Evidence of employee supports, training, risk assessment and Sops must be provided or its seen as a failure obo of the organisation. Unions will jump on any potential failure of the dept to tick every box going before eventually negotiating an early retirement deal etc
In my work we have had an individual of sick prior to a hearing for...... 2.5 years. For a sore knee. Full pay for 6m and half pay for 6m.
Scale this up and you can see where your council tax money goes. This is even before the stupid projects costing thousands are decided!

I agree the first point, but not entirely convinced by the second.  Joining up fifty years ago, the CS left me in no doubt that nothing but the highest standards of probity, honesty and integrity were expected and that's exactly what I found in my colleagues.  No doubt standards did fall over the years, but I suspect the public sector still doesn't tolerate gross misconduct, by and large. 

A few years ago, a colleague responsible for our telephony system (so armed with the access override codes) was found to be abusing his privileged position and calling home to the sub-continent, running up large bills courtesy of the taxpayer.  After one warning, he was silly enough to do it again and was escorted from the building and sacked.