OZ42
I've done a rough calculation of the £3.5Bn and I get the following breakdown:
Sale of aircraft £3,500,000,000
Workforce wages of say 1,500 people at £40k over 15 years is £900,000,000. (I estimated 1,500 people working on the aircraft project at any one time over the 15 years it took to roll out the delivery aircraft).
The annual NI contributions for £40kpa is £3,771 and the annual income tax is £6,705 (assuming the taxable amount is about £33,500 after the personal tax allowance).
Therefore the £10,476 of tax for 1,500 people over 15 years is £235,710,000 (£235.7M) - this is what the workforce would return to the Govt.
So £3,264,290,000 is still in the company. Corporation Tax is 28% (for large amounts associated with this type of project), so IF the company made say £500,000,000 (£500M) out of the contract then that would be £122,500,000 (£122.5M) of tax.
So a "rough order of magnitude" figure out of this sale for tax purposes would be a return of about £358.2M.
So, in this simplistic illustration the program still cost us £3.14Bn - that's a sh!t load more expensive than £1.26Bn for 9x "off the shelf" MPAs from Mr Boeing of Seattle!
The B Word