Cost of the European Elections £ ? (Debate)

Sat 15 Jun 2019, 13:38

Very interesting when you make a comparison like this -and with over half of the population not voting , the use of our struggling health service not being a choice use - I would rather see the purchase of a few more scanners 

Fri 14 Jun 2019, 18:28 (last edited on Fri 14 Jun 2019, 22:53)

That is one way of looking at it.

Another is to compare the cost of running a UK wide election with what we spend on another national activity. The Treasury Budget Red Book (page 4) shows the UK health budget (2019) is £116bn. So the £100m cost of running an election represents about 0.1% of what we spend as a country on hospitals, nurses, etc in a year.

Wed 12 Jun 2019, 23:39 (last edited on Wed 12 Jun 2019, 23:42)

That is quite shocking - about the same cost to build a new 220 bed hospital! Or the salary of 4000 nurses for a year ! 

Sat 8 Jun 2019, 15:03 (last edited on Fri 14 Jun 2019, 15:32)

You can find a breakdown of the cost of the 2014 EU election (I don't think the most recent election costs have been collated yet) at https://bit.ly/2gaVSdu ;

The total cost of that election was indeed about the £100m - actually it was £108m, of which the largest element was the £65m was for returning officers' expenses (ie the cost of employing people to administer the election and count the results). The second largest element was £40.6m for candidate mailings.

The most recent cost of a UK Westminster election (for comparison) was in 2015. That cost £114m and you can find out more about those costs at https://bit.ly/2sYdQaJ

The same report shows there are about 46m people registered to vote - so the cost is about £2.34 per registered elector (although obviously not every elector votes). 

£100m sounds quite a large sum, and it is. But total UK public spending (called Total Managed Expenditure) for 2019-20 is projected to be £842bn. So by my calculation the cost of the EU election represents about 0.0128% of total public annual expenditure.  

https://bit.ly/2zlESMz

Fri 31 May 2019, 10:42

This is definitely Grease Pit territory!

Fri 31 May 2019, 10:30

Reported to be over £100 million???? that can’t be the case  !