You have to admire the ability of Parliamentary Answers to obfuscate wherever possible you really do. Take for example a response to a question about the cost to the public purse of providing hospitality via the Commons dining rooms. Nick Harvey, the Lib Dem MP for North Devon who represents the House of Commons Commission said,
"After inclusion of purchase costs and the cost of staff directly engaged by the Refreshment Department in the booking and delivery of banqueting services, a net profit of over 960,000 was made from hospitality and other events held in the House of Commons private dining rooms in 2005-06."
Sounds great doesn't it? A net-profit of nearly a million quid! However, don't get too excited he followed it by saying,
"This figure does not include overheads such as accommodation, procurement, utilities, staff training or pension costs which are not calculated separately."
He might as well have just said, "However, this figure is utterly meaningless". It's almost as disingenuous as Brown and his PFI fiddles.
4 comments:
In fact Dizzy most of these excluded costs are not marginal costs, they are fixed whether the building is being used or not. Exception perhaps variable staff pensions - but a mystery why that is not simply done as a pc on-costs on wages and salaries which are presumably included.
Another Dizzy storm in a tea cup?
It would only be a storm if I was wrong, but as the figure does not include overheads, it is totally meaningless to portray it as a profit.
Strange that that's the way most companies account for division-level profit, then, with pension funding, training and utilities typically occupying a "shared cost" line...
John B
errr that doesn't distract from it being an utterly meaningless figure.
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