| Value for Money? I was looking at a story about the UK's Project Semaphore the other day and thinking about value for money. Let me explain. The project is a pilot scheme for the British Government's much vaunted eBorders project, which, it is claimed, will enable us to spot baddies trying to get into the country to blow us all up. It won't, of course, catch disaffected locals, like the ones who bombed the London transport system! The pilot project has just finished, and the politicians were boasting about how successful it was - six million passengers screened and 140 arrests. The report was fairly straightforward, talking about how the main eBorders program would now go forward and tenders were out for the contract. The main thrust of the article was about whether in the light of all the other major IT projects going on, there would be enough skilled developers. Much as I like the financial implications for developers like myself, that wasn't what caught my attention. It was the 140 baddies caught that I wondered about. Sadly, I couldn't find out any information about what they were arrested for, but I guess it would be reasonable to assume that had any of them been known terrorists the politicians would have been trumpeting the success of the scheme across the national newspapers. So my betting was that quite a number of the arrests were for relatively minor infringements of the immigration rules. I was intrigued enough to search for material from when the scheme was started to discover that it was budgeted at £15 million . I couldn't find anything about cost overruns - something made me immediately suspicious! However, we can give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it did only cost £15 million. So, £15 million for 140 arrests. I make that just under £110,000 per arrest. That's an awful lot of money to pay to track and arrest someone. In fact it's the sort of Return on Investment (RoI) that would result in mass sackings in most big corporations. And remember that's only the cost of apprehending the person, not prosecuting or anything like that. Significantly enough, figures don't exist for conviction rates, or what sort of sentences were given, or whether those involved were just refused entry, because their papers weren't in order. And lest our US readers are feeling smug about the UK wasting money, let me mention that a few days after reading about Project Semaphore, I came across a piece about the US government's US-VISIT program in security guru Bruce Schneier's newsletter. According to Schneier, since January 2004, US-VISIT has processed more than 44 million visitors. It has spotted and apprehended nearly 1,000 people with criminal or immigration violations. The budget for that phase of US-VISIT was US$15 billion - we'll assume, as with Semaphore, that it didn't overrun on costs - again a very dubious assumption, but we will be generous. That makes the cost of catching each baddie a cool US$15 million. Wow! Maybe we Brits are, in fact, doing really well. It's interesting to know what the government is doing with your tax pounds, dollars, or other currency, isn't it? Oh, and by the way have you noticed that politicians never apply value for money criteria to their pet projects, only to ones they want to close down?
|
If you have any questions or comments about the articles on my web site, click here to send me email. |