There is a significant amount of evidence, accumulated over many years, that government departments and agencies struggle to maintain a sense of proportion when it comes to major procurements - from a 2001 report by the OECD on IT failures which advised governments to 'build dolphins not whales', to the House of Commons Defence Committee's report in 2013 which recommended 'fast, inexpensive, simple and tiny'.42
But this particular pathology is much older than that. In a paper written in the 1830s, Samuel Bentham - who had been an in-house management consultant to the Admiralty (and was the younger brother of Jeremy Bentham) - commented on the inclination of governments to undertake innovation on a grand scale. This was not, he observed, how the private sector usually experimented: 'Government have made all their experiments on a large scale, while the private man has been content to make his first essays in a petty way'.43
To some extent, this is the problem of optimism bias, now well-recognised (although not always overcome) in the planning and execution of major projects. But there is more to it than that - it seems that the adversarial nature of the procurement process and the creation of a strong organisational boundary between commissioner and provider also contributes.