When you put it like that, yep, pretty costly! But a large chunk of this project has been building up the frameworks, infrastructure, tooling, and processes that enable us to migrate from our legacy PHP 5.3 apps running in 2 physical data centres to ~the cloud~.

Also, did you read the part about we have collaborated with over 60 other developers and testers from all around the BBC to build this page? That's actually the best part — News websites are pretty simple; you just display headlines, summaries, and images in various formats. So part of this project was building the lego blocks that we're going to use to rebuild not just the rest of the BBC News site, but also parts of BBC Sport and potentially other BBC products too! So yeah, costly for one page. Hopefully very cost-efficient in the long-term.

'...due to the unique way the bbc is funded...' etc etc

Normal life does not count in the BBC :)

I've seen worse in 'normal' companies, where managers get apathetic about fighting other layers of management so everything moves at a snail's pace.