Please don't blame all the Civil Servants for this. Yes there may be corruption at the higher levels, but the majority of the staff are low paid honest people trying to do the best they can with sub-standard software and abusive clients.
When a new computer system is proposed, any procurement has to go through a very restrictive process. I worked on a few of these in the past, both large and small, and can virtually guarantee that when a reasonable budget was requested there would be a cut of anything between 10% - 20% of what was really needed e.g. new system will cost around £100k to be fit for purpose, but only £80k expenditure would be approved.
The requirements will be defined as mandatory (absolutely must have to comply with legislation) and desirable (anything else which would make the system much better/easier to use/more functionality). If you're lucky, you find a supplier who can actually fulfil not just the mandatory but also a few desirables within budget, but of course you are supposed to select the supplier who can give you the mandatory requirement for the cheapest price half the time.
Of course in the long run it turns out that the supplier's estimates of cost were way off (bidding as low as possible to get the job) and the project goes way over budget - you hear this all the time in the news. Or they cut corners on things like testing, and all sorts of problems appear after a couple of years.
Often there's a case of "oops we didn't think of that" or "we assumed..." by the people writing the spec. Or only management were asked what was needed, and the staff using the system day to day weren't talked to. This situation often occurs because the staff doing the specification weren't the best at the job, because the salary offered was so low that they couldn't get decent staff to do it.
Bear in mind as well that the poor people answering the calls will be on little more than minimum wage and have zero authority to do or change anything, so please don't abuse them verbally!