Comparative costs of CCDP requests « Complicity.

Currently:

That’s quite a simple calculation to do: Each successful data request has a data retention cost of £31.76.

With CCDP:

So that’s £180 million a year for 55,255 more successful requests – or £3258 per request, over 100 times more expensive than under the current data retention regime.

But what about the benefits?

There is a claim (Question 76) that this will have a benefit of £600 million per year. When asked to justify this by Dr Julian Huppert MP, Charles Farr included the phrase “We then attached a monetary value to lives saved”. In other words, it’s not a saving, just an analysis of the benefits. We do not have the raw numbers as the Home Office have not released them, so we can not assess if that “value” of lives saved is actually better spent not snooping on people, but in hospitals.

If we assuming the Home Office are being honest in response to Freedom of Information requests, it may simply be that the £1.6 billion figure is made up. (This would not be the first time we have caught someone making up such figures) When I requested a breakdown of the costs of the proposed system, they claimed it would take in excess of 100 hours to compile the information. Which rather sounds like “We do not have this”.