A new government database kicks off production in the next month or so. It will detail names and addresses, schools immediate adult contacts and more basic data for all children in the UK. That’s 11 million children, and it’s going to cost us, the taxpayer, £240 Million. Thats a total cost per head of just over £21.8 Million. That’s a pretty damn big number.
Now, please, don’t get me wrong. I understand the benefits of multiple parties having access to the most up-to-date information on one of our most velnerable groups, and I think it’s important to do whatever needs to be done to help protect our childrens safety. As a father of a 15 month old I truly cannot understand the way people can harm their children - especially babies. I also recognise the arguments against such a database, it will mean that our health workers, social services, doctors, teachers and all that come into contact with our children have less time to do just that - come in contact with our children, this post however is not to discuss the merits of the system but the price which we as taxpayers have to pay for what adds up to little more than a contacts database.
I’d very much like to see the tendering process for this project, and why it was decided that £240 Million is good value for money. I’d like to see what we’re to get for that money and exactly where the money is going to end up. Getting the data into the database initially is going to cost quite a bit, I recognise that, but let’s have a look at how much this would have cost if we were to use an internet mentality over it.
The whole database has to be accessible UK wide, so the cheapest way of doing this would be over the internet. Dedicated hosting from a top provider would cost no more than £500 per month, I very much doubt that this system would need much more than that as it is a simple database after all - and you may have noticed I am in no way looking at the cheapest dedicated hosting you can buy. The software to run the database doesn’t need to be anything special, so let’s use MySQL - but cluster it, so thats an extra £100 a month. That should be able to handle the limited requests the 50,000 people with access to the system are likely to be loading it with. We can use the rest of LAMP to throw webpages at people, and since the £500 server is already clustered we’ll not need much else hardware or software wise. Now for the programming. This is a big project, so lets make sure we get it right, we could mess about with some Open Source software, make it do what we want, but it may be best to make up your own system. £1,000 a month for maintenance, and a one off of £120,000 should do it, I don’t believe that it should take more than 6 months to write the software and test it thoroughly.
So, what’s next? Well, we need to load up the existing data. 11 million children, so lets say 100 Million rows - gives us some room to play in. Let’s also give ourselves 4 months to get the data in, use the first 2 months of the software timescale to setup the database you see, that would mean we have to load up nearly 1.2 Million rows a day. Let’s also assume the worst case, all these rows need to be manually entered. Let’s employ 5,000 people to do it, that’s 230 ish rows per day per person. I’m going to pay those people £7.00 an hour, for 8 hours a day, because I’m nice and don’t think the minimum wage is enough. So that’s a £24 Million wage bill, plus £15k for the people running payroll, we’ll have 2 of them and another 20k per HR person (3 should do it).
What’s the total? £24.5 Million. Now since we’re a private company let’s double the figure, just in case, and we get £59 Million, well we may as well round it to £60 Million eh?
So, we could build a new national database, take 15,000 people and employ them for months during a recession and hit a tight 6 month deadline and still cost 1/4 of the amount being spent. The problem is though, £60 Million is so much less than the “best” other quote that we’re likely to now win the business for being too cheap… And that my friends is the real truth of this story, to win any government business you have to be prepared to rip the taxpayer off, because otherwise you’ll just be seen as a joke.
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Databases, LAMP, Minimum wage, MySQL, Open Source, Solaris, Sun Microsystems, United Kingdom
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