The total cost of the paper documents has to be the full life cost, so the paper, printing and labour as before but also the waste collecting and recycling. And don't forget the cost of the carbon offset for all the hot air that was generated by the text.
Hey, UK.gov: If you truly spunked £45k on 1,300 Brexit deal print-outs, you're absolute mugs
The UK government spent £45,637 printing copies of the 600-page Withdrawal Agreement it now has to renegotiate – but did our political masters get their money's worth? Trust El Reg's readers to do the maths. In response to a Freedom of Information request from the Beeb, the government said it had ordered 1,300 copies of the …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 21:29 GMT Youngone
Re: What about profit?
The margins in the printing business, at least where I Iive, are more like 3%.
In fact after working for a printing supplies company, I found that about a third of my customers were probably trading while insolvent.
I can't imagine it's that much different in the UK as it is easy to get into printing. Hard to make money though.
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 13:41 GMT Version 1.0
It was outsourced
Like everything else these days they hired a private company to do the job because "outsourcing saves money" - but it doesn't, it always costs more and the extra money ends up in your friends pockets. The function of government is help your chums make money - watch all of the cabinet retire in the next few years (regardless of what happens) and get well paid jobs with industry and media organizations ... oh wait, it's already started hasn't it Boris?
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 13:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
The simple way is to convert it to £($)/pg and see if that aligns with local prices.
£45,000/(1300*600pg) = £45,000/780,000pg = £0.05769/pg
For us USAians, the £ is currently trading at 1.3 $, so that's
£0.05769/pg * 1.3£/$ = $0.075
which would be cheaper than the usual $0.10+/pg that I'm charged at the places I've seen in the US.
But the simple way wouldn't make for a good Reg article either. ☺
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 14:44 GMT daldred
Re: Really?
Actually, paper does have a function at times.
Comparing the provisions listed on three different pages of a massive document is a lot easier if you can spread them out on a desk than if you have to keep jumping back and forward on an reader. Have your read the WA? It's constantly making references to other sections and other documents.
Admittedly a fully bound copy doesn't' help with this. A ring-bound version, now, might be useful.
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 15:40 GMT Flocke Kroes
Re: Will of the people
Irrelevant to anyone in power.
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 14:33 GMT 0laf
If it's outsourced then the private sector body needs profit. Plus building costs, insurance, pension contributions for the workers, an HR department and other related management structures.
Also delivery.
I'm sure there is a business commentard can explain what a normal profit margin would be on this.
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 14:44 GMT Pen-y-gors
Amazon is your friend
Kindle publishing for a 600 page B&W paperback at amazon.co.uk is £6.70 per copy, plus a bit of postage. So 1300 x 6.7 = £8710. Plus a bit of staff time.
The Tories are the party of business - i.e. giving far more taxpayers money to businesses than is necessary. They're not actually any good at real business.
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 15:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Not that expensive for print.
When you work with a print provider you often pay a click charge. A charge per image typically.
These can range from a fraction of a penny to say more than 10p depending on the supplier or if they are a copy shop etc.
In this case if you have 600 pages - assuming duplex x 1300 copies thats 1.56 million images (not pages).
For 45K thats circa .03p per image.
Thats not the cheapest.. but they would have to pay for the paper and also they would need finishing/binding etc.
So... it's not that unreasonable.
Printing stuff isn't always cheap !
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 15:24 GMT SVV
Printer hire costs?
I'm assuming that there is already some sort of print office in Whitehall that has decent printing capability, for all the other paliamentary reports, etc and that the print shop is already staffed by civil servants. If thiis were to be confirmed, then the staff and printer hire costs could also be deducted as they would not be needed specifically for this one print run. However, it is probably more likely that this function has been outsourced, hence the need for the huge profit for the "more efficient private provider" to be added to the cost. Post ministerial directorships all round!
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 15:56 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Amateurs
Over here in the offshore-colonies there is a law that amendments to some act need to be printed with the original text strike-through
An entire squillion page law got overturned in some complicated way which meant they had to reprint it with every single character in strike through.
And then distribute copies to all the official libraries
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 16:24 GMT Jon 37
You can't just assume you have everything set up, staff available, space available, etc. These things take time.
Either you have a permanent staff person for this, and pay them for time they're not printing, or you pay to hire temps through a temp agency who will need to cover their costs and make a profit. Either way there are going to be more senior, more highly paid staff supervising / setting up etc.
Seriously though, this is a non-core task, and it's big enough (and small enough) that most companies would outsource it to a print shop. The sensible comparison is against print shop rates, not the cost of printers / ink.
(10 pages one-off: office printer. 10000 pages every few months: print shop. 10 million pages a month every month: either long-term contract with a specialist supplier, or set up a specialist printing department in the company).
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 21:26 GMT cjmpe
Presumably this is outsourced since we're regularly told that the private sector can to things far more efficiently than the government:
1. HS&E rep for each shift- in my experience this is typically someone who gets shuffled off into the position because they aren't capable of doing real work - so that will be 3 extra bodies.
2. Supervisor to do all of that paperwork that always seems to be needed by the "super efficient" private sector bureaucracy. I'll be generous and assume that this is one person to cover all 3 shifts
3. Overhead to cover the lunches, club memberships, company Jaguar (am I missing anything else?) of the company director
4. Gross margin to keep the stock market investors happy.