To be fair though I think that the "its only taxpayers money" attitude is disappearing. But there are still so many other inefficiencies.
As for your fix. You try firing a civil servant and making it cost less than their salary plus pension.....
I can see you've never worked in the civil service. Promotion, possibly "sideways", is by far the more likely outcome for gross negligence. Sacking people for gross negligence is hard enough even in the private sector under uk law.
HR in the civil service is sh*t scared of the unions and strikes are an option of last resort. Virtually nothing gets that far.
Again as I've commented above it would require such a sea change both in law and process - all of which the unions would fight every last step of the way - that there are undoubtedly other lines of attack.
Then they say, OK, we can do this, and it will cost that much. Any changes however to this spec will cost THAT much.
The bureaucrats say OK and work starts, then they realize that they need to make a whole slew of changes, since they didn't really know what they were doing in these meetings, none of them has ever worked in the NHS, they went straight from Oxbridge to the Civil Service Management Fast Track. But, whatever, it's only taxpayer's money, and Accenture did take us golfing that time.
So it goes. Fix is easy: any civil servant who overspends is dismissed with no severance and no pension. Then you'll see their interests aligned with ours.