I don't want to question your experience but I do think you're looking at some of this through the wrong lens. The problems you've highlighted with e.g. NR are a consequence of the various privatisations not a reason why nationalisation would be worse. I honestly think you've got cause and effect back to front.
But lets start with the Army procurement. There have been a few debunkings of the $10,000 hammer myth and I'd be very surprised if your experience with bolts doesn't fall under one of the explanations various studies have shown to be reality. Yes, some parts are hugely expensive for what they appear to be but you only have to look at Formula 1 to understand the why. In fact a recent advert made a big deal about a precision engineered part (which I'm pretty sure was a titanium bolt or something similar). The point being that the huge expense relative to an off the shelf £2 bolt was the difference between the car (or an airplane) having a disastrous failure (or falling out of the sky). Why would you scrimp on one small part and potentially lose a multi-million pound vehicle?
There were other more mundane explanations too. Largely down to how inventory systems work (computer says no) and "use it or lose it" style budgets. The $10,000 hammer (or $600) is a classic example of the former (see link below).
This leads onto the Armed Forces waste as well. I've seen stories before about "leisure flights" and all of them are eventually explained through the requirement for pilots to clock up flight hours. I'm not saying there aren't unnecessary jaunts but flight planning/logging and ATC would soon put a stop to it.
The other main point is that the Armed Forces aren't run to create profit - which relates directly to Postal Services. You say that letters are a historic anomaly but even having ticked every "paperless" option available I still get a dozen letters per month from credit cards, banks, mortgages, insurance etc. They all need delivering. I'd guess there are thousands of birthday cards posted on a daily basis and then Christmas and other festivals will see even more demand.
The Postal Service was mandated to deliver to every (with a few exceptions) address in the country. The private sector cherry-picks the easy bits and leaves anyone living in a remote location having to sort themselves out. You NEED nationalised services for anything (water, gas, electricity, post, rail) that has a defined and singular network. Just look at the pig's ear that is broadband roll-out and compare that to the telephone network.
Selling off the profitable bits like parcels leads to a service costing a lot and doing less. This is the classic Tory drive towards privatisation which is currently happening apace in the NHS. If the Post Office was still nationalised and was still doing everything it did 40 years ago it would be fine. What we've lost is where we can get back to. The idea that none of what we've had previously is possible can only be considered ludicrous. Anything that makes the private sector more efficient can be employed by the public sector and will, by dint of the fact that profit isn't a factor, be more economical at scale.
Going back to your experience with NR procurement etc. I'd virtually guarantee that people are the problem - not the system (inherently). Someone with a mate raking in 10x costs isn't going to award you a contract at 2x costs without scuppering his mates business. Very simplified but that's the game being played. As with everything, there will be a running battle between dubious practice and regulation. In local government and the NHS there are increasingly stricter rules on accepting anything from business partners. Corporate events/conferences and account management meal-meetings are all used to hide what is essentially low-level bribery.
All the moving parts of rail can be nationalised because we've been there before and it worked (until the Tories started picking it to pieces). Don't let current mis-management and bad practice get in the way of progress.
Hammer Time
Not at all, NR's own spec change is the reason that tender requirements to private contractors change. Private contractors don't make up their own tender requirements documentation, they just put together a tender submission based on the tender requirements, and the tender requirements point to a load of various spec sheets (written by NR).
It's like me asking you to price up to build me a bungalow for my granny, but my spec sheet requires a bungalow to be 5 stories high. Granny is only going to use the bottom floor, which is a good thing as the access to the other 4 stories will get bricked over and the rooms filled with grout. Public pays for 4 stories it doesn't need, and which are impossible to make use of.
NR specs are written internally, so why would you think the private company would chose a spec which makes things more difficult for them, or why would you think they could even say to NR your spec is a load of crap? NR just come back and say "but that's the spec, please price as per the spec".
No idea what you're talking about with £10,000 hammer, I'm only talking from personal experience (8 years of it, almost every day) and through the same experience of anyone who has worked on aircraft in the RAF. Someone else on here probably has, I'll eat my old beret and no 1 hat if anyone disagrees. All the tools, and toolboxes we had were made by snap-on, if that helps? I bet the RAF are paying more than screw fix are though, and I bet there aren't many top mechanics who know what they're doing paying £100 for a spanner, as they know a £20 spanner will last a lifetime anyway. They won't be buying £5 spanners though.
Those £80 bolts are so good that they have to be wire-locked in place, that's how good they are.
You can wirelock any nut with the wire locking holes, and it will never come undone enough to detach, and nyloc or Loctite work even better than that, as they don't come undone at all (when torqued correctly, which spec calls for anyway). They're just normal 10mm steel bolts. It's like when we use pipe in utilities on major wind farm/ powerline jobs, I can buy class 1+ electric duct for £30/mtr, or I can buy PE 100 pipe for £20/mtr and it's made in the exact same place (both extremely well), at the exact same grade. Most of the bolts aren't made of titanium, they're made of steel, weight matters, but not at all costs. Titanium ones would be double the price again no doubt. Quite a lot of fasteners are titanium, and some airframe bolts may be titanium, the massive ones at least. There's a reason why defence companies make a killing, as they get asked to provide daft things at daft prices.
Formula 1 is far, far more advanced than Aircraft Engineering is, as it's far more current with the times. The Typhoon we got in 2005 was a 1980's jet. The data download "brick" for each flight only had 2MB capacity and was as big as two 20 packs of cigarettes stacked, and had a serial port, lol. £2 for a bolt isn't scrimping, £2 for 10 bolts might be scrimping. £80 is a ****-take.
The inventory for bolts and fastners was packs of a 100, as that's how they're packaged, break the seal and that pack is done, whether you need 1 or 50. I don't think I said "computer says no", but it would have been a fitting term, but it was more like "storeman says yes, more than you need or doesn't have what you need". The computers were probably too old and out of date to say no, everything ran on windows which was 10 years out of date. It was funny as we could have a grounded jet for two weeks, waiting on a few fasteners, then 100 turn up and 90 go in the bin. then the next week we need to change another radar and the same thing happened again.
Pilots do need to clock up flight hours (worthwhile hours), but flying round the airfield or mach loop for an hour isn't doing much for the pilot of a Tornado as he's not talking to a nav/ weapons guy in the back, he's talking to a chef or a mech who got the jolly for "being a good lad" or knowing a pilot. On typhoon we had some single-seat jets (no jollies in those) and a load of twin-seat jets but they were only trainers, the jet can be flown as well as possible with one guy, so having another guy in the back seat wasn't losing much for the pilot, but it also meant the jet wasn't being used for training new pilots (which is what the specific jet and squadron were 100% there for). We used to take celebs up too, we sent Prince William up, sent Richard Hammond up too I think, when we raced the Bugatti Veyron down the runway. Hammond dropped his jaw at the 15 jets, which were brand new, but 20 year old tech, we dopped our jaws at the 2 bugatti Veyrons (which were current tech). We did a couple of jollies a week (more known as a back seater or pax trip), usually Friday afternoons. The only pilots who needed to be topping up hours were the ones who were not authorised to be trainers. No pilot in training would ever take up a celeb or some random in the back seat as they were not authorised to fly without a trained pilot (instructor) in the back. i.e it was impossible for the hours for the jollies to ever be much use, and they were certainly not worth the cost. The excuse of "clocking up hours" is there to paper over a crack, seems to work on some.
The above is just in the UK though, we were doing 2 back seaters per day when aborad, like when we were in vegas staying on the strip for $100 a day extra pay, for a month. The only place we didn't do back seaters was in the gulf.
Yeah I still get letters too (largely from banks or credit companies I'm not with), it's annoying, they don't need delivering as they don't need to be sent, most of it is just a spam equivalent. Birthday and Christmas cards are not a reason to keep letter deliveries going, and I expect their use is declining (physical ones at least). Our lass talks to her granny on an ipad/ facetime now, that wasn't possible when birthday/ Christmas cards were invented and it should serve the purpose better?
Yes, I'm aware of the mandate, it's a bit silly in 2023, and should be mandated to end. People chose to live in remote locations, and you can get every bill online, with a better record and faster, which is why the vast majority of people do this, which will increase every year until mail no longer exists. The broadband roll-out has been good. Spending £200/mtr for BT to lay a cable 5km to a house out in the sticks is a million quid. They could get mobile broadband for similar speed/ cost as a monthly fixed line, without the £1m connection, or even star link or whatever. I've told about 100 people this year they don't need me to price a 2km connection for a single fibre, as they can just use 4g and save themselves the 200k or so we would charge, which nobody pays anyway (which is why I don't quote).
Public companies won't do things as efficiently as private companies, as private companies are brutal with cost, efficiency and staff. I'm not saying that's the best way, but that's the way it is. Most of the time I deal with private companies I get results quickly, any time it's public agencies it takes the classic line of "we have 28 days to reply". If public companies could be run with the same whip cracking as private companies then great, but the staff won't do it, not for the low pay public employees get, they would want the same pay as private work, and then would still want all the benefits of what comes with working for a public company (ie get treat a lot better generally).
People are the problem in NR, same as Highways, the Councils, the EA, the Coal Authority, Canal and River Trust etc, people invent crap to justify their jobs, so everything gets bloated. Enough "crap" was invented 20 years ago where things were more than high enough spec, safe and high enough cost etc. Things have largely got no better they just cost more, as there's more dicking about. This is why you see 10 guys stood around a hole, rather than 2-3 guys. The people quoting 10x aren't their mates, they're random companies on a tender list who have completed the PQQ, they're other contractors like me, they just price what is asked. I price what is asked and also give another price which does the same job and saves the taxpayer a fortune. Most of the time the latter gets binned off with public companies as they don't give a toss about saving money, as they don't think it's their money (it is it's their tax). Private companies price things on a fixed price, so any cost-savings you offer get snapped up (if good ideas), as if they save cost, they make more money, as they still get paid the same fixed price. This is why HS2 and Hinkley C have all gone through the roof, just like every project does which is priced long in advance, it's a lie.
Changing Rail or Highways to Labour won't fix them unfortunately, there will still be 10,000 people employed doing the jobs of what only needs 3,000. The only benefit to this is it keeps 7,000 more people employed, but efficiency goes through the floor, and costs rockets, which isn't budgeted for.
I thought teams might have been a good thing, to cut out travel to site (which it has done, I don't leave the office now), and speed up meetings, but all that happens now is people have multiple meetings for the same thing, and now instead of having two people in the meeting there's 6, and in the next meeting there are 2 original people and 4 different others and so on. I now list meetings as an open-ended ratable item on the quote (per half hour), whereas before I would just include a fixed allowance for this built into our rates.
We're working on a 132kV cable route now, and highways want a RSRF (record of structure review form) for a retaining wall holding back 800mm of spoil where their own spec says they don't need one for walls <1500mm retained height. It hased caused a 2-month delay now (2 x 28 day reply periods) for a major givernment data centre, which is probably going to miss its national grid connection date, so will end up another 6 months behind.
Sorry that was so long, just giving additional detail, I've got 25 years more of it.
