Expert questions the reported costs of the Lewis case

The numbers intrigue me. £100000 "wasted" might sound like a lot to a Hebridean taxpayer But hang on. You don't get much out of £100000 in terms of groups of people investigating things and it is comparable to costs in Child Protection Conferences with court hearings. 5 CPCs x 5 people per hearing x £20 per hour salary x 4 hour meeting time = £2000 in meeting time alone. Suppose each person puts in 10 hours work before each meeting (interviewing children, parents, each other outside meetings, driving, writing up their reports). That's 5 x 5 x 10 x 20 = £5000, making £7000 if you don't go to court. A day in court with 2 barristers and 2 solicitors costs somebody £2000 (mostly to pay the barristers). Family court allegations of sexual abuse drag on a day at a time over several months. Say five hearings. That's £10000, paid either by the parties or Legal Aid. So that's £17000 bill for one family just because one teacher "thinks that the child might be being emotionally abused by the father". Back at Hebrides rather than the Family Court and Child Protection for another angle. Eight people charged on a budget of £100000. That's £12000 per person, or 600 hours investigation time per person charged, assuming no overlap. Perhaps the "over 100 officers" counts includes out two policeman on a "dawn raid" occupying one hour elapsed time. That's 200 hours investigation time used up for starters, leaving the bean counters with some 400 hours left. That's about one week for ten people in a core team. So this investigation by my guesstimates is one Portakabin office of ten people thinking and talking about what the Hebrideans might be getting up to, sending out 100 cops, and interviewing 8 people and writing up the reports, all done in a week's work time spread over 133 days (one day a week).

At the risk of labouring my point, which I think is not so much the large sums of money in total, but the small amount per person, look at the documents. Somehow this team allegedly read or wrote 220000 documents (assuming there wasn't a huge mass of starting material). Even if ALL the budget was on documentation reading and writing, then each document cost 50p to write or read. At £20 per hour that's one minute per document. No wonder they wrote pulp fiction; or perhaps there's a lot of photocopying and cut-and-pasting going on. *In particular there is no time for analysis, cross-checking, Webster-style follow-ups, bibliography searching etc. There could only have been time to coach the documents out of the interviewees, staple it together intending to bung it in front of a jury and hope for the best.*

Finally, this SWIA document of 150 pages. They appear to have skim-read 200000 documents, presumably incurring £100000 bill to do so. The only thing SWIA will have done is fillet out choice bits to support their agenda, typeset them nicely with a glossy cover with silhouetted children's heads, and then publish it. I am reminded of a the Robin Cook remark on the Iraq intelligence dossier: "No. 10 believe in the intelligence summarised in the September dossier because they desperately wanted it to be true. Their sin was not one of bad inclusion but of evangelical certainty. They selected for inclusion only the scraps of intelligence that fitted the Government's case and gave them an edge that was justifiable. The net result was a gross distortion." Perhaps theAAFAA copywriter can have that quote in mind when they review the SWIA document at the end of the month?