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?

The cycle lanes in London that cyclists don’t use.

HS2.

Not just the NHS IT systems. Government IT systems on the whole. When I was a civil servant, we paid an American company millions, when they could not deliver on time, we gave them more and due to workers who use it not having any input, it was rubbish and scrapped. And let us not forget ATOS the French company. We spent more than what we saved and left a lot of disabled people poorer. Basically, governments and councils are the biggest wasters.

A local Free School - cost millions to set up, was rubbish - now shut down - waste of good money that could have been better spent on the local schools (that are good) that needed it....

x that by lots of these silly free school 'projects' across the country ….

I had a smart meter. Then I did what you are supposed to do and changed supplier at the end of the year as it was cheaper.
My smart meter is now a dumb meter as there's no compatibility between the companies.
I mean, how STUPID is that? All that money for about 6 months of 'smart'

I have a water meter fitted. They can read from outside, apparently, without having to gain access to the property.

So why the fuck have my last two bills been estimated then?

Answer: Because the actual amount of water I use is around £20/quarter. If they estimate my bill they can charge me £50/quarter and hold on to my money for the time it takes until my ACTUAL bill catches up with them.

Totally agree re smart meters. The adverts irritate the hell out of me by implying you will automatically save money when they’re installed - bollocks!

Don’t see why investment in free schools is a waste of money though? Our local one opened 3 years ago and fills a much needed void of secondary school places locally. It takes all children prioritising only by siblings then distance from the school (not like the bloody Catholic School up the road). Sounds fab to me?

" 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."

The problem here is the public. Politicians could put more money into public transport and less into roads, but they're too scared of the public's reaction.

I understand the concerns about ID cards, but I think they're inevitable really. They're needed in the modern world. The trouble I had opening a bank account actually made me want them.

I was thinking earlier today: the big boys love their vanity projects, don't they? Others have been:

Rail privatisation.
The Dome.
Iraq (Tony Blair's personal vanity project).
London 2012.
HS2.
Very topical: changing all the train timetables. FGS if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The garden bridge

They’ve shelved that, haven’t they?

Smart motorways have cost millions, all they do is pointlessly slow down traffic and cause delays near junctions, creating jams and more dangerous situations than if traffic were flowing seamlessly.

People who fraudulently claim benefits thereby making it harder for those in real need to get them and lazy arsed people who simply can’t be arsed to get a job and use benefits to live on forever.

Nobody can be forced into accepting a smart meter.
Brexit was a democratic result

East Coast mainline/Virgin debacle. Should have just kept it under government control in the first place.
Smart metres have worrying security implications so we won't be having one.

Forgive me for this, but:

HS2 is apparently passing underneath a village a few miles away from me. (south northants)

This tunnel by the village is such a massive project that it will need it's own 'machine, materials and plant storage area' to support it right next to the village. Picture it. The storage and delivery area for everything which makes a massive underground tunnel - they have earmarked fields right next to the village.

To cope with the lorries which will be going to and from this storage area they are having to re route the road which currently passes through the village. The new road will pass within meters of the village but no longer go through it. A whole stretch of new A road instead going past the village and joining up back up with the old road a mile or so away.

Imagine the cost and the destruction and disruption of this teeny bit of the route alone!!! This is to get round/through/under ONE village.

I was explaining it all to one of my DDs recently. She said - this is that big new railway they've been on about yes? Where will our nearest stop be? I said 'there's no stop near us. There is no bloody stop near us! It's not for us!!'. I think that's when it fully hit me; actually explaining it out loud. So

and breathe.

"Nobody can be forced into accepting a smart meter. "

My electricity company told me they will be compulsory soon. I told them they can try, but if their meter man still refuses to ring my phone to get in then I still won't have one. (My door bell doesn't work and meter man seems incapable of following instruction to call me so I won't be getting a meter).

I second HS2. We don’t need it. Just make what we’ve got already better!

The west coast main line is already fast.

Hs2 will bring no benefits at all. The dates will be so high people will go back to driving.

The only ones who will benefit will be the airlines.

HS2 is going to be amazing :)

^ sarcasm . I hope

Small scale, but it's how your council tax is spent.

1. Street Name sign at the top of our road was attached to the end house, a bit rusty and disfigured and possibly falling off.
2. Council plant a nice new 3-foot high street name sign in the unfenced lawn of the sheltered housing opposite.
3. Council plant a beech hedge around the sheltered housing.
4. Council can't get on to the lawn to cut it - rip out some of the hedge.
5. Hedge grows and totally obscures the road sign.
6. Hedge now patchy, so council put nice (expensive) metal railings with gates around sheltered housing.
7. Gates in fence not big enough for lawnmower.
8. Council remove part of fence and install double gates for lawnmower.
9. Council attach new street name sign to the end house.

HS2

Yes smart meters, but also every other green subsidised outrage the public has had to fund likenthe stupid green deal that tanked.

PFI projects.

The expansion of higher education so that students could get heavily in debt for pointless degrees so vice chancellors could have four hundred thousand grand a year and go on a building splurge.

Every single road change ( bus and cycle lanes, traffic lights to slow the traffic) that Slough council has ever made. Probably true of every town and city in the country.

Subsidising people in London to have cheap public transport while those who live elsewhereare virtually fined for coming into their own capital city. The infrastructure for doing this.

OFSTED. Has it improved standards? Ask the primary with outstanding teaching in Devon with a hundred per cent white intake whose grade was slashed for not being multicultural. It is a shocking waste of schools’ time and money and is only there to push PC values.

Waste in the NHS.

Large new public computer systems.

But, hey, it is only money and you have to pay your dues to the party gods. Money isn’t real. It is a symbol and mode of exchange.

Oh and free school meals for primary school pupils regardless of parental income.

WTF? Nobody was asking for this. There was already a system for free school meals for low income families.

Why are my overprivileged kids getting free school meals which we could well afford to pay for?

Laiste - we're right in the path of the bloody thing (like a matter of a couple of metres outside the compensation belt - not that they're behaving at all reputably about compensation and property blight anyway) and really near the East Midlands hub station and I look at the station location and think "are you on bloody crack?!" They could have put it linking up with East Mids Parkway, linking into the airport, the M1 corridor, the skylink buses and everything else... but nope - they've rammed it into the arse end of Toton and Stapleford which get gridlocked if someone blows their nose on the M1 anyway, where the public transport's iffy as fuck unless you're right near the tram terminus and nowhere near anything really in particular at all! Bloody bonkers decision on that one.

OFSTED. Has it improved standards? Ask the primary with outstanding teaching in Devon with a hundred per cent white intake whose grade was slashed for not being multicultural. It is a shocking waste of schools’ time and money and is only there to push PC values.
I remember a wonderful argument I had with an LEA advisor when the FS profile was initially brought in. I was working at a very very white British (we had a transient traveller community's kids in and out as well but that was about as close as we got to ticking any other boxes on ethnicity questionnaires and before anyone starts the kids were blooming lovely and we had no problems with that group of kids or parents at all ) Roman Catholic school and was asking how the hell I was expected to assess the points about awareness of different cultures and beliefs. Advisor kept resorting to that trick advisors tend to do when totally stumped - they just kept re-reading the passage in the guidance notes again and again in a slightly slower and more exasperated voice until conceeding that I was likely to be very unlikely to provide a nice instance where Rebecca chirpily and spontaneously piped up with "oh yes, Ahmed's not in school today because his family are celebrating Eid and it's important to them".

One from a few years ago when ambulances changed from the old skinny 1980s style ones you still see on old episodes of Casualty to the big ones with the box style back you see now... a certain NHS trust spent a bomb building a new ambulance depot and HQ... then upgraded to the new style ambulance fleet... which didn't fit in the bloody depot!

The price of food.Yet there is still obesity and diabetes because the sugary, floury, processed crap is far far far cheaper than the organic, grass fed, free range whole foods by at least double the price. As an overweight person I would be happy with an incentive to grow my own fruit and veg in the form of an allotment or plot, so I can be confident to finally become what I eat. Thanks you very much. Zoodles anyone?

@flexoset I 1000% agree with this