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The cost of Britain's controversial new aircraft carriers is set to rise by at least £1bn, and perhaps almost £2bn, as a result of the government's decision taken last October to make them compatible with different aircraft than those originally envisaged.

I have learned that the working assumption of the contractors on the project, which are BAE Systems, Thales UK and Babcock, is that the carriers will now cost taxpayers some £7bn in total, compared with the £5.2bn cost disclosed by the Ministry of Defence last autumn - and up from the £3.9bn budget announced when the contract was originally signed in July 2008.

One defence industry veteran said the final bill was bound to be nearer £10bn, though a government official insisted that was way over the top.

The Ministry of Defence and the Treasury believe that total final costs could be nearer £6bn, if only one of the carriers is reconfigured to take the preferred version of America's Joint Strike Fighter aircraft.

An MoD official said no final decision had been taken on whether the first carrier to be built, the Queen Elizabeth, or the second carrier, the Prince of Wales, or both would be reconfigured.

He said it would probably be the case that changing the design specification for the Prince of Wales would be the cheapest option. But if that happened, it is not clear when - if ever - the Queen Elizabeth, due to enter service in 2019, would actually be able to accommodate jets (as opposed to helicopters).

Whatever happens, the increase in the bill will be substantial - and is only regarded by the Treasury as affordable because the increment is likely to be incurred later than 2014/15, when the expenditure constraints put in place by the Chancellor's spending review come to an end.

The Treasury is adamant that the MoD will receive no leeway to increase spending before then.

An MoD spokesman sent me the following statement late last night:

"The conversion of the Queen Elizabeth Class...will allow us to operate the carrier variant of the Joint Strike Fighter that carries a greater payload, has a longer range and is cheaper to purchase. This will give our new carriers, which will be in service for 50 years, greater capability and interoperability with our allies. Final costs are yet to be agreed and detailed work is ongoing. We expect to take firm decisions in late 2012."

The disclosure of the rise in costs is bound to reopen the debate about whether the UK really needs new carriers, especially since the UK will be without any aircraft carrier till 2019, following the decision to decommission Ark Royal.

British Tornado jets are currently active in Libya, flying from a base in Italy, without the use of a British aircraft carrier.

The latest increase in likely expenditure on the enormous carriers - which are almost the size of three football pitches - stems from the decision of the Ministry of Defence in October to change the design one or both of them so that they can be used by the carrier version of America's Joint Strike Fighter.

This would mean they have to be fitted with catapults and traps - or "cats and traps" - rather than ramps.

The likely final cost will depend on whether the cats and traps are cheaper traditional steam devices, or newer-technology electromagnetic ones - and also whether the cats and traps are fitted to both carriers or just one.

Industry and government sources tell me that even if the MoD goes for the cheaper option, and even if the cats and traps are fitted to only one carrier, the additional bill will still be of the order of £1bn.

The hope however would be that in the longer term savings could be achieved because the maintenance costs of the more conventional Joint Strike Fighter should be lower.

One of the reasons the refit could be relatively more expensive is that for one of the carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth, there would have to be a retrofit - because so much work has already been done on it.

"Retrofitting is always very pricey" said a senior defence executive.

The carrier project has been beset by controversy and cost increases.

In June 2009, I disclosed that the carrier costs had soared by more than £1bn as a result of a decision taken by the previous government to delay their entry into service.

Then last October the government, in its Strategic Defence and Security Review, came close to cancelling one or both carriers.

In the end, it committed to build both, but with the strange caveat that it might end up using only one of them. This was the reason given by the Prime Minister David Cameron in the Commons for building both:

"They [the previous government] signed contracts so we were left in a situation where even cancelling the second carrier would actually cost more than to build it; I have this in written confirmation from BAE Systems".

However in a memo to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the Ministry of Defence estimated that cancelling both contracts would have saved £2bn and cancelling just one would have saved £1bn.

The MoD told MPs that "as the cancellation costs would have had immediate effect, the costs in the short term would have been significantly higher than proceeding with both carriers as planned; nearly £1bn more in financial year 2011/12 if both carriers had been cancelled".

The MoD was also concerned that cancelling the carriers would have undermined British capability and know-how in the manufacture of complex warships.

The carriers, called Queen Elizabeth Class Aircraft Carriers, are being built by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, whose members are the UK defence giant BAE systems, the British engineering group Babcock, and Thales of France. The Ministry of Defence is also described as both a member of the Alliance and a customer.

Update 15:06:It has been pointed out to me, by what you might term a grizzled sea dog, that the UK does still possess two ships that can take aircraft. They are HMS Illustrious and HMS Ocean (which is a commando carrier with a flat top).

However they can't accommodate jet airplanes, only helicopters - so for veteran sailor it was a terrible error for the government to scrap the illustrious Harrier jumpjet.

He also takes the view, which I've heard from many other military personnel, that it would be bonkers to convert only one of the new carriers to take the carrier version of the Joint Strike Fighter - because if that were to happen, one of the carriers would be an enormous white elephant, and the other would not be able to provide a service for 100% of the time (it would need periodic servicing).

That said, the cost of retro-fitting the first carrier being built now and also redesigning the other one would certainly be nudging £2bn, maybe more.

He believes there is powerful strategic logic to building two new huge ships able to handle jets.

The problem for David Cameron is that he may find it hard to make the strategic case, since last autumn he justified building the two on the basis that it would not save any money to cancel one - which is not the most positive case for what turns out to be a very substantial public investment that anyone has ever advanced.

Belatedly, I've got round to looking at the Treasury's recent decision to change how it calculates the necessary contributions that have to be made to cover the future costs of unfunded public service pensions.

My interest was sparked by a letter sent to the chancellor by 23 pension experts, organised by the consultant John Ralfe. They argue that the Treasury has made a mistake in its choice of a new so-called discount rate.

If you think this is tedious abstruse stuff that has no relevance to you, think again. The aggregate public-sector net liability for pensions is so huge - perhaps £1 trillion - that it matters to all of us as taxpayers, especially those likely to be paying tax in 10 and 20 years time, that the government has a reliable and accurate valuation of pension promises.

Pensions represent, to coin the phrase, a massive off-balance-sheet debt. And as we've all learned to our cost from the financial crisis of 2007-8, it is a bad idea to carry on blithely pretending off-balance-sheet liabilities don't exist.

So what is this blessed discount rate? Well in the private sector it can be seen as the number used to translate into today's money a commitment to pay £650 a week pension (for example) for 30 years or so to a retired employee (till he or she dies), so that we can see whether there's enough money in the pension fund to pay that employee (and all the other employees) during his or her long retirement.

The point of the discount rate is to assess whether there's enough money in the pension fund - or whether it needs to be topped up.

Which is all very well, except that for most of the public sector, there are no funds or pots of money to pay for future pensions. Most of the pension promises are unfunded, payable out of employees' current contributions and out of general taxation.

That said, since public sector workers are increasingly expected to make a contribution to the costs of their own pensions, it would presumably be sensible for that contribution to be set at a level that is rationally related to the value of promised pensions.

So what is the best way of measuring the cost today of new pension promises?

Well the government has decided to "discount" those promises by the rate at which the economy is expected to grow.

Now there is some logic to that: the growth rate of the economy should determine the growth rate of tax revenues; and the growth rate of tax revenues will have a direct bearing on whether future pension promises will bankrupt us all or not.

But here's the thing. Any private sector chief executive might well be sent to prison if he or she decided to use the equivalent discount rate for a company, which would be the expected growth rate of that company's revenues or profits.

The reason is that although it might be possible to remove subjectivity (or in a worst case, manipulation) from any long-term forecast of the growth of GDP or of a company's turnover, it is not possible to remove considerable uncertainty.

To illustrate, the Treasury has chosen a GDP growth rate of 3% per annum as the discount rate for public sector pensions, which is considerably above the rate at which the UK economy has grown for years or indeed may grow for many years.

If we were growing at 3%, we would in practice be less worried about the off-balance-sheet liabilities of public-sector pensions, because the on-balance-sheet debt of the government would not be growing at an unsustainably fast rate.

To put it another way, in choosing its view of the long term growth rate of GDP as the discount rate, the Treasury is arguably understating the burden of future pensions to a considerable extent.

So what discount rate do companies use?

Well they are obliged to discount the liabilities at the yield or interest rate on AA rated corporate bonds.

Which may not be ideal, but has some advantages: there is a market price for AA corporate bonds, so the yield or discount rate is difficult to manipulate by unscrupulous employers; and it tells the company how much money would need to be in the pension pot, on the basis that all the money were invested in relatively safe investments (AA corporate bonds).

Now Ralfe and his chums believe that the discount rate for public sector promises should be the yield on long-term index linked gilts (gilts are bonds or debts of the British government) - partly because this too has a difficult-to-manipulate market price and because an index-linked government bond is a very similar liability to a public sector pension promise (both are protected against inflation, both are in effect debts of the government).

They point out that gilt interest and principal payments are paid out of future tax revenues, just as future pensions are. So if the value today of future pensions should be discounted at the GDP rate, that's how index linked gilts should be value on the government's balance sheet - which would be bonkers.

Anyway, if you've read this far (and many congratulations to you if you have), you may take the view that it would not be rational to impose a tougher discount rate on the government than on private-sector companies - which is what Ralfe et al seem to want, in that the yield on index linked gilts will always be lower than the yield on AA corporate bonds (because HMG, even with all its debts, is deemed to be more creditworthy than any British business).

But for a government and for a chancellor who have made it a badge of honour to bring transparency and prudence to public-sector finances, prospective GDP growth does look a slightly rum discount rate for valuing those enormous pension liabilities.

I can't recall a flotation like it, in terms of the sheer number of executives emerging as wealthy beyond most people's wildest dreams or expectations - not even the conversion of Goldman Sachs into a public company or the listing of Google.

When Glencore publishes its full flotation prospectus later this morning, it will show that there are four billionaires working for the world's leading commodities, minerals and energy trader.

These are led by the chief executive Ivan Glasenberg, who will be shown to be worth around $10bn.

But it is the quartet of billionaires, plus many others worth more than $100m each, and hundreds who are millionaires, that makes Glencore quite extraordinary.

Now all the top executives are saying they won't sell any of their shares for five years at least - that they won't use the flotation to cash in. As for Glasenberg, he's pledging not to sell even a single share till he steps down as chief executive.

Even so, the stock market listing converts their stakes into currency. These are not paupers.

Is there a price for them of this remarkable valuation of their respective Glencore holdings?

Well their company is already receiving vastly more public scrutiny - for it's environmental record and tax practices, for example - than it did as a pretty secretive private company over the last 20 years or so.

It won't like all this attention - such as claims in this morning's Daily Mail of how Glencore's copper mining operations in Zambia are doing too little for that country.

And it certainly didn't enjoy the furore sparked by remarks of the new chairman, Simon Murray, about how women's desire to have babies prevents them rising to then top in business.

But some of you might feel that whatever embarrassment is caused to Glencore's bosses will be softened by all that personal wealth.

Update 16:44: Oh dear. There’s another billionaire at Glencore I somehow missed.

The prospectus – which is longer than Proust, and racier than Proust in parts – shows that the chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg is worth just under $10bn.

Also, two of his lieutenants are each worth around $3.7bn, one other has a $3.2bn holding and the fifth in this billionaire quintet has a $2.8bn stake.

The poor finance director, Steven Kalmin, is worth a mere $610m.

As the FT points out, each one of these has a holding worth more than what the famous (some would use a less flattering epithet) founder of Glencore, Marc Rich, pocketed when he sold the business to management less than 20 years ago.

In IndyCar Series history, driver Helio Castroneves ranks second in second-place race finishes. His legacy, beyond being a three-time Indianapolis 500 winner, might be that of being this era's bridesmaid.

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