Puffbox

Where did Chris Huhne get the figure of £40,000 for the annual cost of David Miliband’s blog? I thought I’d email to ask him. And he replied. So full marks there. 🙂

It all comes from a parliamentary question, answered by DEFRA’s Barry Gardiner on 5 June:

The Secretary of State writes his own blog. Two staff in Defra’s Communications Directorate – at Grade 7 and Higher Executive Officer grades – have integrated the blog into Defra’s website, and continue to oversee operation. For the two weeks following the recent ministerial changes, approximately 30 to 40 per cent. of their time was spent on work in some way connected to the blog. This is expected to decrease. The blog promotes a new and more direct form of communication between the public and the Secretary of State.

Apparently his researcher ‘merely took the salaries of the grades specified to get the result.’ I can’t lay my hands on the DEFRA pay scales, but looking at other departments’ data (eg DfES), a Grade 7 salary is probably £40k to £45k per year, and an HEO salary around £25k.

So how do you turn those salary numbers into an annual total of £40,000? The best I can suggest is that they’re taking the total salary for those two people (let’s say £67,000), multiplying by the top end of the time estimate (ie 40%), and adding 50% to cover ‘overheads’. (That comes to just over £40,000. Try it.)

But let’s look at those figures another way. Two people spending ’30 to 40 per cent’ of a ten day period is a total of eight person-days. Even adding 50% for overheads, I make that a setup cost of just over £2,000 – after which it probably becomes normal website maintenance, and almost impossible to quantify separately.

As ever, your calculation is entirely dependent on your guesswork, your assumptions, your extrapolations… and given that this is Westminster, your party position. Always remember this is politics, not mathematics.

Many, many thanks to Chris for replying.

Update: I’ve had a subsequent email from the LibDems’ Daniel Wilson, confirming: ‘PCS civil service wage statistics show that the two civil servants who work on Miliband’s blog cost up to £61,457 p.a. (for the senior member) and £40,500 p.a. (for the more junior member). As they spend up to 40% of their time on the blog, this equates to £40,782.80 p.a. in staffing costs.’ So even if those PCS figures are valid – and they aren’t too far away from my ‘add 50% for overheads’ numbers, the calculation is based on maximum figures across the board. Politics not mathematics, as I said…

Update, 25 July: grateful to Guido Fawkes for referring the traffic to my humble blog… but I didn’t ever claim it ‘costs the taxpayer a pound a word’. If anything, I think I did a reasonable job of undermining Chris Huhne’s initial claim. And Miliband told the (Newcastle) Journal on 17 June: ‘We are trying to bed down the ongoing administration costs as we speak but we know that they are going to be less than 10% of an existing junior civil servant’s time.’ Even applying the ‘add 50% for overheads’ rule, you’re talking £3,750 pa.

‘Ever wondered what happens when Europe’s political leaders get together? Well Eddie Izzard did, so he set off for Brussels to find out. The popular comedian, who has a passion for European issues, tagged along with the PM’s party for a behind-the-scenes look at what happens at a Council meeting.’

Eddie Izzard continues his bid to become ‘Britain’s favourite europhile’, with this remarkable contribution to the Downing Street website. The inclusion of amateur photos of the trip – and I mean that in a positive sense – is a really nice touch. Well done for mimicking Flickr’s ‘photo set’ presentation, too.

The BBC’s Nick Robinson covers the ‘shock news’ on his own blog. But he’s wrong to call it ‘No10’s first podcast’. In fact, it’s arguable that Downing Street actually invented the podcast?!

Starting in February 2000, Downing Street went through a phase of producing regular MP3 ‘addresses to the nation’ by Tony Blair – trying, I suppose, to mimic the US President’s weekly radio broadcasts. It started out as a weekly thing, then inevitably became a bit more sporadic over the summer break, and never really recaptured its rhythm. Was it a podcast? Depends on your definition. To a purist, it isn’t a podcast unless it comes in an RSS feed. But these days, the term is seemingly applied to any posting of audio content. In which case, Blair was there right at the beginning.

Oh… and just to make this even madder… Tony Blair will be co-hosting Radio Five Live’s football phone-in tonight. I thought I’d heard someone on the radio say so this morning, but then my brain said it couldn’t possibly have been what they said, and made me get on with my breakfast. Best listener-submitted question so far: ‘Are you going to be supporting England at this world cup, or will you just support the USA regardless, like you normally do?’

I’m really surprised at the sudden backlash against David Miliband, secretary of state for the environment, and Britain’s first blogging minister. A piece in Friday’s Independent, based on ‘research by the Liberal Democrats’ urbane front bencher, Chris Huhne‘ estimated the cost of the initiative at ‘somewhere approaching £40,000 a year.’

First off, let’s remember that Chris Huhne isn’t an entirely neutral observer here. The LibDems see the environment as ‘their’ territory, so it’s no surprise to see them having a pop at anything DEFRA does. And of course, in his role as shadow Environment spokesman, it’s Huhne’s specific task to hassle David Miliband.

And whilst I’m sure there is some convoluted calculation which brings the total cost to £40,000, I’m not buying it. By the time you factor in every overhead, as I imagine Chris Huhne has done, you could probably inflate the cost of any task to five figures (or worse!).

The other criticisms, rounded up by Antony Mayfield, seem a bit petty. It may or may not be true that every word is written and typed by Miliband himself. It may or may not be ‘widely ridiculed for its dull content’ (as claimed in Monday’s Independent). But folks, this is government. This is how it works. Virtually nothing happens without going through several layers of sign-off (sadly). And a lot of day-to-day government business is not sexy. Just how exciting did you expect the work diary of Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to be?

As reported here a couple of weeks back, I’ve been involved in setting up a blog-esque site for the Department of Education and Skills. It uses a blogging engine, specifically Typepad. It uses blogging methods, like permalinks, RSS feeds, categories and chronological presentation. We could choose to allow comments and trackbacks – but we chose not to, because we didn’t feel we could commit the necessary resources to do a good job. And so far, the results are pleasing: we’re getting respectable traffic and good search engine placement.

These are baby steps. The only way we will build the confidence within government to do these things ‘properly’, is to show concrete examples which dispel the scare stories.