to think these may be the biggest wastes of human time and money in our life times?

[futuristic1]

I've restricted my thoughts to wastes of British time and money, and these are just the first two I could think of...

£11billion - Smart Meters - on R4 earlier - will take at least 5 years longer than predicted to fit. Will only save, at most, (if anything), half of what they cost consumers to install and don't work now and may never work when people change suppliers.
£11 billion pound waste of human time and money that could be better invested elsewhere.

£50billion ++ Brexit

The way things are neither leavers or remainers will end up happy with the 'deal' so instead of at least 52% population being happy, the outcome will be that the winning 52% will be unhappy as will the losing 48%.
So Brexit as it stands, makes everybody unhappy.
Fair enough, you can't make all of the people happy all of the time, but is making all of the people unhappy all of the time the best alternative?
Surely not?

Why not stay in, save £50bn ++ and settle for 48% of the people being happy?

What other 'grand projects' is the British population currently engaged in that you feel history will judge to have been a waste of time and money?

Can't give you figures off the top of my head, but we seem to prioritise roads over public transport. How crazy is it that for more than one person to travel it is so often cheaper to go by car.

I'd far rather travel by train for social and ecological reasons, maybe hiring a car at the other end. But financially, it just doesn't work out.

Ties in with your Brexit point - we'll be spending even more money to turn the M2 and the roads around Dover into a giant car park.

More money on roads than public transport? You've not seen the potholes round here then....

Sometimes it just seems as though 'Change' is made to happen, forced to happen (somehow), in order to give people stuff to do...

Pre-smart meter there must have been a finite number of electricians in the UK. There must still be.

And yet, this massive amount of work appeared out of nowhere and is being made to be done.
But at the end of it, will there be a massive number of redundant electricians?
Or will another 'grand project' evolve to keep people doing 'stuff'?

Someone, somewhere, seems to live in fear of us getting to the end of our 'To Do' list.

The garden bridge

Top down reorganisations of the NHS

Good one - £46m - that's a lot of potholes filled... or something else en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Bridge

At least if they'd finished it, there's have been a bridge to show for it.

It's not nebulous. I mean a bridge is a thing.

But smart meters only mean there'll be no more estimated bills (apparently) - no necessarily correct bills or cheaper bills just not estimated.
That's not as good as a bridge.

Brexit - well we managed to make most of the population unhappy.

We didn't give the people who voted for it what they wanted and we took away what the people who voted against it already had.

Hardly the Wisdom of Solomon!

I feel quite lucky that there was no room to install a smart meter.

I was told I had to have one. Engineer comes out, takes one look at placement of original meter and says they'd have to knock part of the chimney breast down to fit it or something like that. So that was that.

the NHS electronic records IT project...11 billion up to 2013, then abandoned

PFI

On a much smaller scale, in my local area:

A lot of money (and six months of traffic delays) on moving mains water and gas pipes in preparation for an rail extension that isn't going to happen now.

I doubt this situation is unique. Scale it up to all the areas around the UK with similar projects. I expect it would come to millions of pounds.

Well i love my smart meter and can't wait to leave the EU so for me YABU. However i'm sure both could have been handled better

I had someone try to flog me one. We have PAYG meters, this is a HA property. The gas meter is OUTSIDE, downstairs, on the wall outside the downstairs neighbour's flat. The leccy one is in our flat, in a cupboard on the opposite side from that outdoor wall where the gas one is.

He still tried it on after I told him there was no way I was having one. Why not? Why didn't I want one? Did I know how they work?

I told him, 'I don't have to explain anything to you. I don't want one. Since you don't seem to understand, 'I don't want one', try understanding this: FUCK OFF!' and I hung up.

Our smart meter stopped working a week after we got it, cant say weve missed it!

I'd forgotten about NHS electronic records! Is that just abandoned? Wow!

ID cards - how many times will the Home Office bring that one up? They'll keep doing it until they get it, I expect.

PFI, yep.

So, if we all stopped 'doing' this stuff, could we all knock off early?

Cant think about Brexit, makes me too cross...

Sometimes it just seems as though 'Change' is made to happen, forced to happen (somehow), in order to give people stuff to do...

^^ This, in bucketfuls, describes where I work to a tee, but also general life in this country!!

OK, not so small scale after all. Aforementioned pointless utility diversions seem to have cost £130m.

Screenshot of wikipedia

PFI and loads of NHS expenditure, the IT project being the most glaring example, although probably dwarfed by the extortionate price it pays for a lot of drugs.

£15.8 million - Scottish referendum
The cost of free schools:

"The average cost of each of the 175 free school sites bought by the DfE so far stands at £4.9m, with 34 sites having cost more than £10m each, including four that have cost more than £30m." (The Independent)

HS2. Carving up beautiful countryside and costing billions

Our Smart Metre assessment was a joke. They were supposed to come round, explain it all to us and where they were going to put it and then come back the following week to fit it.

What actually happened was they came in, looked at our current metre, looked at our switchboard, went outside and stared into a big box of wiring shared by all the houses on our row, came back in, stared at our metre a bit more and then left, deeming us unmetreable.

The water metre man faced similar when he declared us the most whacked setup he'd ever seen and "where the fuck am I supposed to put a metre in here?!" So we are still on fixed rate and the council are having to lump it.

Most of the changes within the NHS in the last 3 decades

@expatinscotland

As it is, the gas meter is totally gubbed. It works, but when the HA contractor came to do the yearly service, he said the meter is not registered. Well, it was last year when gas inspector came, and two months ago when the hot water stopped working. So we rang SSE, the supplier. They decided the whole thing needs replaced and are coming on Tuesday. Again, it's outside against the wall a floor down. And the leccy meter is indoors in a cupboard.