How much does it cost to change a light bulb? Cost efficiency, Boris Johnson style

During the London Mayor elections, Boris Johnson and his campaign had to get the bulbs changed in five lamps in their office.

No surprise there really.

But you might be a little surprised at how much they paid.

Changing five lamps required someone to be paid for two hours of work, at £28.98 per hour. (That’s 24 minutes per lamp.)

Plus 10% administration fee.

Plus VAT.

Add in the cost of material and the total bill came to £88.81.

Nothing like a bit of value for money is there? (Copy of invoice here.)

P.S. I’m now off to become an electrician.

Share:
This entry was posted in London, Opposition watch and tagged . Bookmark the permalink or use the short url http://ldv.org.uk/3121 for twitter and emails. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

10 Comments

  • dreamingspire
    Posted 6th August 2008 at 10:26 am | Permalink

    It probably cost £20 to issue the invoice and another £50 to process and pay it.

  • Justin Hinchcliffe
    Posted 6th August 2008 at 10:28 am | Permalink

    Bye, bye, Mark. I hope you are more useful as an electrician than Head of the Innovations unit (-:

    And you could start up Electricians’ Voice. Stories to include, Watchdog finds leading company over-charging by 3p for washing machine repair job

  • unseen
    Posted 6th August 2008 at 10:55 am | Permalink

    To be fair, it’s not like they had much choice in the matter – the invoice is from the management company for their County Hall office, not from some random electrician. They probably werent’ allowed to change them themselves.

    And if they were integrated into the celing or tube-lights, they are fiddly and take time to change.

  • Sandy
    Posted 6th August 2008 at 11:49 am | Permalink

    £80 ?

    They will save that much in 6 months using energy efficient lightbulbs.

    Why do I get the feeling this is just a “Bitch at Boris” rather than any intelligent political discussion ?

  • Posted 6th August 2008 at 12:21 pm | Permalink

    I’ve moderated a comment that appears to be from a Conservative Parliamentary Candidate passing themselves off as an unhappy Liberal Democrat. As ever, if a mistake has been made, apologies and just get in touch

  • Jay Entee
    Posted 6th August 2008 at 12:29 pm | Permalink

    £28 an hour for a spark is not bad value at all. Nothing to see here.

  • Martin Land
    Posted 6th August 2008 at 4:05 pm | Permalink

    Poor old Boris; I suppose his Fag used to change the light bulbs for him at school…

  • Posted 7th August 2008 at 11:11 am | Permalink

    I think that the banned fagging ages ago, but we’ll have to ask David Rendell.

  • Posted 14th November 2008 at 3:59 am | Permalink

    The thing is if i was asked to change the lamps for a public/government building, not only would I be “changing the lamps” i would have to produce a method statement and a risk assessment but I would also need someone to hold the step whilst i went up them (health and safety at work).

    £88.00 seems quite cheep overall when it includes vat, tax, employers national insurance liability insurance parking fuel …. you get the idea.

  • John
    Posted 16th March 2010 at 10:30 pm | Permalink

    following the successful LD campaign to ban incandescent light bulbs – lets pass a law insisting that all “energy saving” bulbs are dimmable – other wise energy will be wasted

Post a Comment

Lib Dem Voice welcomes comments from everyone but will not publish personally abusive comments. Our comments policy is published here, please respect it and all readers of the site.

Your email is never published. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Do you agree to the T&Cs?