The NHS IT Economic Black Hole.

To illustrate how much a billion pounds was by equating it to a man on the median wage—about £23,500 at the time. I pointed out that—even were he allowed to keep 100% of his earnings—it would take such a man 44 years to earn a million pounds and thus 44,000 years to earn a billion.

Via Question That, here is a CiF comment that puts it another way.

The NHS IT programme is a complete, utter fucking mess. It doesn't work and it never will work. It will eventually be scrapped, and if Liebour were still in power it would promptly be replaced by something even more useless and expensive.

It will end up costing the taxpayer twenty billion pounds. Do you understand what twenty billion pounds are? Let me help you:

On the day that Queen Victoria died, I put half a million pounds in used fivers in a suitcase, took it out into the woods, and burnt it in a bonfire. There wasn't any good reason for doing this—in much the same way as there isn't any good reason for much of Liebour's 'public spending'—but I did it anyway.

Then I did the same thing the next day. And the next. And the next. Every day of every week of every month of every year since the day that Queen Victoria died I have been burning half a million pounds in used fivers in a suitcase in a bonfire in the woods.

And I'm still not at twenty billion. I've still got nearly two years to go.

That's the sum of taxpayers' money that Liebour have spunked down the drain on one single foul-up in one single Department. If you're genuinely stupid enough to want them to carry on, then use your own money. Give them all of it. Tell them they can spend it on whatever they like.

They'll be delighted.—Cloutman

Queen Victoria died on the 22 January 1901.

It is worth pointing out that the state, in its multifarious forms, will be spending some £650 billion of our money this year.

Were I to take the steps that Cloutman suggests—burning half a million pounds a day—it would take me just under 3,572 years to burn what the state is spending this year alone. In other words, were I to start burning half a million pounds a day from the date of Queen Victoria's death, I would be done sometime in the year 5473 (roughly).

The trouble with such enormous sums of money is that even when you attempt to put them into some sort of perspective, the numbers end up so huge as to be as meaningless as the number that you started with.