Blunders and Operational Disconnect

I have been reading "The Blunders of Our Governments" by by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe recently.  The sheer incompetence of our political system often worries me.  The authors try to identify a number of factors behind appalling blunders like the PPP, the Poll Tax and so on. 

One area they identify is "operational disconnect" where the decision makers neither know nor care about how to actually implement policies.  They siuggest this is becoming more common in central government as a result of the Next Steps agencies separating the administration of policy from the policy makers.  However, it strikes me as a possbible danger in local government as more and more services are commissioned rather than dealt with inhouse.  This doesn't have to lead to a disconnect, but it is a danger.  Meanwhile, there is still the old fashioned problem of decisionmakers simply not caring abhout whether their policy will work in practice, but that is another discussion.