Anybody see this from the Lost Cousins newsletter? Is there anything to it?
**********
GRO reveals costs - at long last
After 8 weeks - twice the statutory limit - the Circumlocution Office, sorry, General Register Office eventually responded to my Freedom of Information request and provided a summary of the costs relating to their certificate service.
If the figures supplied to me are the only ones upon which the pricing decision was taken, then I am shocked - they don't appear to have considered the possibility that a lower price for certificates might produce a greater income. Buying the special paper and printing the certificates costs just 16p per certificate; posting a certificate costs just 23p on average. The rest is accounted for by staff costs, IT, property costs, depreciation, bank charges, and 'support services'.
Can you imagine a commercial organisation remaining in business for very long if all they did to set their prices was add up their costs then divide the total by the number of units they expected to sell? You don't need to have worked as an accountant (as I have) to know that many costs are fixed, and that as more units are sold the average cost of each comes down. And you certainly don't need to have studied economics (as I have) to know that when you cut the price the demand generally goes up - which means that reducing the price of certificates to £5 might well have produced a greater surplus for the taxpayer than raising it to £9.25.
Whoever wins the forthcoming General Election I sincerely hope they'll get the GRO working on a more commercial footing - if companies like findmypast and Ancestry were as inefficient they'd be charging us £1000 a year for their services!
