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I've worked in a UK Government IT department. My experiences with working there and working on these kind of projects, and I've seen some belters, is this:

• Doing the work internally is seen as a colossal risk. Use of in-house IT staff to deliver stuff quickly and cheaply is frowned upon. Far better to farm out the risk to #outsourcer so arses can be covered and everyone can deny everything. This is so ingrained in the mindset. Consultants are litterally showered in cash for saying the same thing that the IT sucker down the corridor said.
• There is a massive reliance on middle men who are very happy to organise things so everyone else does the work and they are then free to build little empires. Contract managers, application managers (with little to no IT background) and project managers (constantly harping on about how successful they are - depends on how you define success. If its trousering large sums of cash for some shoddy work, then quids in!).
• Attempts at introducing automation process and work (and trust me, there was a lot that could be automated) cause panic and a massive attempt to undermine them is carried out.
• Everything by committee
• The quality of Civil Servants vary massively. You rarely get the ones that are quite succinct and give you a short brief and are happy to let you get on with it. These don't tend to stick around as writing endless policy documents all day is boring, watching the endless parade of petty empires rise and fall gets old fast and the pay is shit. The more common ones are clueless and are hostile to anyone intruding into their empires. They scorn expert opinions and industry research and believe that they are right. These kind of people will happily spend £8 million on a basic content managed website and then pat themselves on the back on a job well done
• As for the IT staff, the ones with technical knowledge are few and far between and will eventually leave for greater things. All that leaves you with are a bunch of contract managers (to micromanage the #outsourcer) and contractor project managers (who say yes to endless requirements from clueless wonks).
• Finally, you get the permanent contractors. These are the canny contractors who probably got made redundant from the Gov Dept ages ago but because they had the right bit of knowledge and were able to frighten the right people with dire warnings, they've been kept on at a massively inflated rate. They've been there years (if you see an expensive car or two sat in a government office carpark, chances are it'll be one of these permanent contractors). But they've not been rehired into permanent positions because that would mean they would then inflate the staff headcount and they'd have to be paid out of a different budget pot.

Bitter, me? Maybe a little, but I got out of gov a while back so it's long since morphed into jaded cynicism. It was a truly bizarre world in many ways. The amount of money thrown about, the colossal amount of time and money spent building applications that are available readily off the shelf but are rejected, the endless meetings, etc etc.