They do a good job of conflating a bunch of stuff to give themselves an eye-catching headline. When I say "good job" I'm not suggesting that it's competent journalism - competent rabble-rousing, but no more than that. To be precise, they take
the £20 million already spent on the development of ID cards and dividing this by the 7,000 people the Home Office expects to issue them to
and from that derive the headline figure of £2,857 per person.
I think anybody visiting CUK would understand that taking the amount spent on a project to date and dividing it by the number of users involved in a trial roll-out aimed at about 0.0001% of the anticipated final number of users does not provide any kind of meaningful figure in terms of the ultimate cost-per-user.
At this point they insert a link, possibly in the hope of distracting one from the obviously bogus "journalism" above, possibly because they don't know how to modify their ASP.NET templates and had to stick a link just there or see the whole page fall apart (a common failing with sites built on ASP.NET). Still, that's not important right now.
Below the fold they head even deeper into assertion that is fundamentally nonsense:
Even if the Home Office expanded the pilot scheme to a further 7,000 British nationals each year until 2014, ID cards would still cost £571 each to produce and there is no indication that the costs of producing the cards could come down.
This sentence appears to say almost nothing. Still, let's take it on its face: if the scheme is expanded to include a further 35,000 people (assuming that's what they mean by "a further 7,000 British nationals each year until 2014") then dividing the £20 million spent to date by that number of people in 2014 will mean a cost of £571 per person.
But this is even more meaningless: more money will have been spent by then, so the overall cost per card will be even higher than (if we're going to adduce such precise figures) the £571.42857142857 that we get from £20 million divided by 35,000.
It should be pretty clear by now that this article is nothing more than somebody playing with a calculator. Furthermore, they don't really know what they're doing with it.
Deriving the supposed unit cost of an item several years hence from the current expenditure on development of said item is just plain stupid. Failing to understand the fact that the development cost and the unit cost of manufacture are two entirely separate things suggests imbecility.
Given the domain name of the site containing TFA, I assume it is staffed by people who got degrees in politics, and who have never done anything else. It is rare for me to find some basis for agreement with the Evil Witch Thatcher, but in this case I think the "journalist" should have been forced to supplement his politics degree with, at the very least, some basic lessons in the economy of industry. Conflating R&D costs with manufacturing costs is unbelievably imbecilic, and trying to construct a political argument on the basis of such imbecility is... well, just plain dumb.
YMMV
handling stolen goods to get the money to pay
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