please empty your brain below

I had an analogous situation with my office photocopier. The supplier quoted a 'click price' of 0.04p per copy, then billed at £0.04 per copy. That mistake cost them many hundreds of pounds over the contract period when I insisted they honoured the contract.
Excellent stuff.

Have you copied the Mirror in on your post so that they can put in another FoI request about errors in FoI request answers?!
There is an errant period in the final two tables for the Quad Royal poster price total.

However, as a maths teacher I strongly encourage the use of commas to separate large numbers into thousands, etc., in order to increase legibility.

Your blog numbers should go through the roof given the exposure you've received - or, perhaps not?!
Of course, the Daily Mirror .......which never makes mistakes .... (read that with irony glasses on) is not subject of FOI.

People do make mistakes and there is sometimes a cost. People learn from mistakes! In the scheme of things this is trivial compared with, say, fitting windows to new Routemasters or, the two cancelled SSR resignalling contracts
I know a bit about print costs and all the figures quoted seem either ridiculously high or low . Print costs have come down alot with digital advances eg the number of fast food flyers we get through our doors .

The figures are miniscule compared to the tfl budgets but more worryingly are the inaccuracies, whether by design or imcompetence. Are FoIs ever audited ?
I think it's very generous of you to assume that it was a mistake putting 0.08p.
Should ask them to estimate delivery and collection costs of poclet maps as well.
You could equally argue as to why the Daily Mirror didn't query the costs regarding pounds and pence.

After all, the Daily Mirror has more insight than most regarding the costs of printing things!

It's as though each side is on auto-pilot, neither group hugely bothered about accuracy or checking - btw, why do the story this year.
Perhaps I am more patient than most, but, although irritating one must accept that errors like this will happen from time to time no matter how many mechanisms you have for checking stuff.

Whatever systems you put in place will in the main just make this sort of thing less likely, rather than impossible...

I'd be much less forgiving if it was millions of pounds, a public safety issue, or something which stopped something getting built...(croxley link debacle).

Still, it's absolutely right we hold tfl to account (well done DG) and you make a good point about FoIs. Government bodies hate these and have developed their own ways of avoiding them, which is the bigger issue here in my view...
FOI should be about public authorities providing information to the public. For some reason it is treated as a game where the idea is to provide as little information as possible, in the most misleading manner possible.

Perhaps the cost of the *printing* - applying ink to paper - is indeed 0.08p (still seems very low) - but what is the cost of the paper, folding, packaging, delivery, design, etc?
Did TfL have to pulp the maps in the first place? So Morden is wrongly placed in a "special" zone not in Zone 4. So what.

But it might have been a reasonable decision to take if the cost was really as low as TfL's figures imply.
I noticed on the DLR is had the whole of the Becton Branch in Zone 3 on the in carriage maps....
And finally, would the price quoted be exclusive of VAT?
At least TfL has the decency to pulp all their printed material when it contains errors or misleading information; unlike the Daily Mail.
8p a map feels way too high given the volume, while 0.08p a map feels low.

A couple of thoughts:

- Is it possible that TFL has its own in-house printing press? Aside from maps, there are dozens of posters required a year - often at very short notice. However a number will undoubtedly be reproduced on what is effectively a large format photocopier.

- While getting incredible rates for a one-off job is unlikely, a TFL contract for a wide range of printed material might mean that they get a bargain on 0.5m maps printed 4 times a year for a number of years or whatever. The printer perhaps making no money on those, but getting a profit from the larger printed items.
The FOI mentions print suppliers, which would seem to exclude in-house facilities.

It's the £2 for 700 full-colour ticket machine maps which convinced me to disbelieve the prices quoted.
You're right. £2 for 700 ticket posters must be nonsense.
If there are errors in the figures provided - and it does look likely - then it is certainly not a blanket pence-for-pounds error.

8p each for printing pocket tube maps would be absurdly high, probably by a greater ratio than 0.08p each seems to be low. But I agree with DG that the prices for the bigger formats look quite shaky.

But I agree with Espadrilles that it is possible to make too much of an error which is trivial compared to many mistakes which public and private bodies are making all the time.

There is also the matter that replying to the FoI request and any creative accounting involved could also be seen as a further waste of public money. Sending good money after bad.
By a strange coincidence, today the BBC reports that a council had to spend £1,200 correcting publicity material that had a possessive apostrophe in the wrong place...
You must be so thankful you've never ever made a mistake.

Ever worked in print?

dg writes: Yup.

Of course this should not of happened but we live in the real world, we're human.
Printed materials are zero rated, like books. That includes printing services, and preparatory or post-production work as part of an overall zero rated supply, but not services of an "original or specialist nature" such as writing or composition, nor free-standing services which do not create a zero-rated goods, such as sub-contracted typesetting. Book binding is zero rated too. Clear? See the HMRC guidance.

240×125 is a somewhat smaller then B5 (250×176). I wonder what size paper stock it is printed on - it does not seem to fit efficiently on A sizes, but you might get say 40 copies on a B0 sheet with sensible margins.

Now I think about it, the folded map size is a bit weird too. 297mm is one of the A3 or A4 dimensions, but 149mm does not go into 210 or 420 well. But it is close to 300×150. Hmm. What are the standards sizes of paper rolls?

Is there a printer in the house?
They should have kept some of the maps back and sold them to collectors at a premium rate.
Looking at the guidance, maps are zero rated, unless they are (inter alia) posters or 'plans or drawings for ..., commercial or similar purposes, in any format'.

Perhaps that's why TfL always describes it as a 'Tube Map' - to ensure it's zero rated (a leaflet designed to be used as a reference material and kept (rather than read and discarded)' is also standard rated!)
All the "Weekend disruptions" and "Sorry for the poor service" and that sort of poster are printed in house on large format inkjet printers at certain strategic points on the network. You can see one through the windows at certain stations.
And what's more, those large format printers are supposed to be ready to go at any time. They will suddenly start printing out stuff without any warning whatsoever - I believe new Control Room Assistants (or whatever they are called now after Fit for the Future) get used to it after a while.
Mark - Sure we all make mistakes, but there is a certain pleasure in pointing them out or querying the figures.

It is important to point mistakes out as otherwise people may think it is acceptable to carry on making them and a sort of creeping tolerance of mediocrity could creep in.

It's the sort of malaise that could potentially lead to train indicators being useless at Bow Road.

But that would never happen would it?!
I've got a small wee stack of of the Morden error maps in my collection at home. They'll be worth loads on eBay in several years time, right?
This kind of "gotcha" stuff seems to be what passes for journalism these days. How much money was wasted by TfL in providing answers to the Mirror's questions?
Less than the 'cost' of printing.
Even on TfL's dodgy accounting basis.
100andthirty, James Webber, +1.

I'm a map nerd but I think this whole non-issue and its subsequent reaction is way overboard.
In your analysis of the prices (consideration of whether they are too high or too low), don't forget that the maps for TVMs are not printed on paper but on "sticky-backed plastic" (for want of a better term). The cost will therefore be significantly higher than a paper map of the same size.
It used to be that whilst TfL had a Reprographics department that was able to do photocopying (and related binding and laminating) on an industrial scale, everything else was done by specialist printers under contract. The exception being a few things such as locally printed posters etc.

I assume that a similar thing still applies today.










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