Much ado about not very much

Someone very indignant brought this story to my attention today, together with a lot of complaints about how this country is going to the dogs, and that the UK is wasting a lot of money on "multiculturalism" and "immigrants". That, of course, isn't true, but it gives a certain type of Briton some satisfaction to think so. The problem with this particular instance is that the amount of money is peanuts.

First, a quick summary of what the story is about - basically under the current Labour government, it has just been decided that men in polygamous relationships will be allowed to claim benefit for all their wives, not just a single one, despite bigamy being illegal in the UK. Now, this is wrong - why should immigrants get paid to break the law? But the Telegraph story implies that this is a big waste of money. It's not - as a bit of thought and Fermi estimation will show.

• Benefit that a polygamous couple gets per extra wife = GBP33.65. A quick search on Google doesn't enlighten as to whether it's weekly or monthly, so let's just assume it's weekly (52 weeks in the year) for the worst case scenario.
• Number of polygamous families in the UK = 1,000. Let's assume that they are all 4 wife families, giving 3,000 extra wives in total.
• Then extra amount spent on benefit to polygamous families is 3,000*33.65*52 = GBP5.2 million.
• If the benefit were paid daily, the amount spent is GBP37m.

Now, even GBP37m is pretty small compared to some of the cock-ups announced recently. For example, see this story on defence overruns on both the Astute submarine and Type 45 destroyers - approximately GBP2bn. Better focus management energy and talent on sorting out the big wastes first.