The post you are reporting:
How much more do they sweep under the carpet........
Minister's veto keeps public sector jet set's £77m flight bill a mystery
: Public servants spent £77m on inter-city hops and First Class tickets to tropical islands - but their
departments must remain a secret after the minister for transparency ruled it would be wrong
to subject them to 'hostile scrutiny'.
Chloe Smith, the Minister for Political and Constitutional reform, has ruled that civil servants
would be subject to "hostile scrutiny" if a secret government database detailing £77m of flight
bookings, including a £1,700 round trip from Birmingham to Newcastle, was released in full.
The Daily Telegraph has obtained the records of 235,000 airline bookings covering 1,302
destinations made in one year by the Government Procurement Service (GPS), which acts
as a travel agent to the civil service, councils, quangos and the NHS.
They reveal how public servants:
- wasted thousands of pounds booking long-haul flights at more than ten times the price found online;
- frequently used air travel for short flights across Britain that could be made by train;
- breached civil service rules by making hundreds of First Class and business class flights over short distances;
- made more visits to tiny tropical islands than to some of Britain's most important trading partners.
Crucially, Miss Smith's decision to keep the departments and public bodies who used the flights
secret makes it impossible to say which of the journeys were strictly necessary. It cannot be said
which were booked by Downing Street or the Foreign Office, and which by local councils or quangos