The cost of social division to the public purse in NI ranges between £400m and £830m every year.
A further point to note is the wide ranges involved with all these estimates. The £830m upper bound for the estimated cost of division is more than double the lower bound (£400m). [...] The Cost of Division in Northern Ireland is a briefing paper from UU’s Transforming Education series. Although this new report’s primary focus is on education, it also looks at the wider context of division. [...] "In 2016, the Economic Policy Centre at Ulster University produced figures for the cost of division in NI. They too admitted that teasing out the costs that are due to division is challenging and, in relation to social costs for example, they concede that "division has created significant social issues and associated costs, but these have not been identified or quantified". Also, they only considered data provided by others – they undertook no primary research themselves. Nonetheless, by comparing the costs for public services in NI with other similar regions of the UK, they produced an upper and a lower figure within which costs could at least partly be ascribed to division. This additional cost was calculated at between around £400 million and £830 million per year – over half of this attributed to policing and justice which is considerably more expensive in NI than elsewhere in the UK."