According to the Wikipedia article, which may or may not be accurately stating things:<p>&gt; <i>Whilst original estimates from the DWP planned for the administration costs for the rollout of Universal Credit were £2.2billion, by August 2014 this estimate was revised to £12.8billion over its &quot;lifetime&quot;. The cost has since increased to £15.8 billion.[29] At that date only 7,000 claimants were receiving UC, although there are now over 175,000.</i><p>The cost of the rollout is £15.8B. Its customer base is currently 175K. There&#x27;s no indication that costs won&#x27;t increase when the customer base increases by an order of magnitude. Besides simplifying Facebook&#x27;s business model and operations (akin to calling Google just a big web scraper), you seem to be underestimating what&#x27;s up ahead for UC, or you seem to think that software is just built and then maintains its value and functionality with no future costs whatsoever.