Public servants enjoy £20,000 flights

By Matthew Holehouse

PUBLIC servants spent £77 million in a year on flights around the world, including first-class tickets to tropical islands, but their departments must remain secret after the minister for transparency ruled they should not be subjected to "hostile scrutiny".

Chloe Smith, the constitutional reform minister, ruled that civil servants would face aggressive scrutiny if a database detailing £77million of flight bookings, including a £1,700 round trip from Birmingham to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was released in full.

Under freedom of information laws, The Daily Telegraph obtained the records of 235,000 airline bookings covering 1,302 destinations made in 2011 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 on long-haul air travel tickets, some costing more than 10 times the price online. They also used air travel for journeys that could be made by train, breached civil service rules by making hundreds of first-class and business-class flights over short distances and made more visits to tropical islands than to some key trading partners.

The data shows how officials spent £20,361 on a single return ticket from London to Penang, Malaysia, flying economy class. Officials also spent £26,502 on a pair of economy-class tickets to Brunei.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said much of the spending had come from the "wider public sector".

[top] [back]