Re: Ah, the good old UK public sector!
re "incompetent IT staff", etc.
Been there - done that. It's far more nuanced than just Idiots-work-for-the-council. It's basically a Kafka-nightmare in miniature, played out by the characters from Gormenghast.
The staffers are not typically incompetent at all. Not necessarily the top 10%, but certainly more than capable of keeping the IT lights on.
It's the layers and layers of middle management who bog everything down. That's where the "couldn't get a proper job in the real world" individuals are to be found. Too many decisions made at that level are self-serving and fly in the interests of the tax-payer.
Add to that the senior management, who, like CEOs everywhere, spunk too much money on their pet vanity project, but then leave before it gets finished, only to get replaced by a looky-likey clone with another totally different vision that requires a complete U-turn.
And then you have the tendering and procurement processes that effectively guarantee that all promising and well-intentioned initiatives get compromised to the point of being unrecognisable.