UK Government Paying 7 Times More for Oem Toner Cartridges

Giving some examples of the wasteful spending that has supposedly been banished from Westminster, several newspapers quoted Mr Maude as saying that the cost of printing varied wildly between different parts of government.

The Sun said: "Mr Maude said some departments had been paying seven times more than others for the same printer ink."

This was fleshed out slightly by the Financial Times, who quoted the Cabinet Office Minister as saying that "[Sir Philip Green’s efficiency review] had discovered that some parts of government were paying seven times as much for black toner cartridges as others."

This may have set alarm bells ringing for Full Fact readers with long memories.
Last year the Cabinet Office made similar claims about the costs of procuring laptops, saying that "government departments and agencies paid between £350 and £2,000 for the same laptop."

When we investigated the matter however it turned out that these costs weren’t for the "same laptop" at all, but instead compared one top-spec machine with added security features such as a fingerprint sensor, and a more run-of-the-mill computer.

So is Mr Maude’s printer cartridge comparison any more reliable?
Looking at Sir Philip Green’s efficiency review as the FT suggests, we can see that printer cartridges were indeed one of the products highlighted as having a different purchase price in different parts of government.

However, Sir Philip seems to suggest the variance is more modest, with the highest price paid for the cartridges around four and a half times larger than the lowest:

In fact, the Cabinet Office itself was more muted when it made the same claim last year. Back then, it said in a press release that "government departments and agencies… paid between £85 and £240 for the same printer cartridge from the same supplier." This would suggest that the higher cost was just under three times that of the lower.

This would seem to throw some doubt over whether the comparison being made in this morning’s papers is really comparing like with like. So is Mr Maude wrong?