How many civil servants does it take to change a light bulb?

This article might give us a clue:

The EU farm subsidies system is a "masterclass of misadministration" in most of the UK, the head of the Commons Public Accounts Committee has said... Farming minister Jim Fitzpatrick has disputed figures showing average claim processing costs were £285 in Scotland, but £1,743 in England...

The National Audit Office said the current average cost of processing a claim in England was now £1,743. This is often much more than the value of the claim itself and is far more than the average of £285 under the simpler Scottish system. The report said that since the scheme's creation in 2005 it had racked up more than £680m in "unforeseen additional costs", including £304m in extra staff costs and £280m in penalties for late payments and administrative errors. It has also overpaid farmers an amount totalling somewhere between £55m and £90m.

Mr Fitzpatrick said they "did not accept" the NAO figures on claims costs... He said they had cut the number of administrative staff from 4,500 to 3,500...

Notwithstanding that these payments are straight subsidies to land ownership, and hence the worst kind of subsidies, is it too much to ask to at least process this reasonably efficiently? If we take 4,000 as the average number of civil servants involved and assume that there are 200,000 payments a year*, that means it takes a civil servant about a week to process one single claim. Once you take a week's inflated salary, plus gold-plated pension promise, overheads, fines, overpayments, late payment interest etc, the NAO's figure of £1,743 processing costs per claim seems perfectly plausible.

The basic idea is simple, its acres of land owned/rented x a fixed amount per acre, depending on what type of land it is. Of course, they've added on all sorts of complications (a landowner can sell or rent out land while retaining the right to claim the payments, for example) and transitional measures, and no doubt you can argue over whether something is woodland or grazing land etc, but that sounds like three or four hours work to me, seeing as the land-owner/occupier will be happy to point out why an award is set too low.

Now, does anybody know how many civil servants it takes to change a light bulb?

* According to The National Farmers' Union, in the UK "the number of full-time principal farmers fell very slightly, by 0.5 per cent, to 146,300, while the number of part-time principal farmers declined by 0.9 per cent to 196,800". Let's assume all full-time and half of part time farmers make a claim and that 5/6 of the resulting figure relate to England (being 5/6 of the UK population), gives us 203,917 claims.