Oh Lordy.

The Daily Mail rants against the FCO travel package.

Tim Worstall falls for it.

Try something like this.

Any normal employer posting employees overseas includes an arrangement in the postings package for letting staff return to the UK periodically. Does the Dail Mail post anyone overseas? Do they not do that?

The further away the employee is from the UK, the more it costs to get him/her/family back to the UK once or twice a year for a break or family reasons. Plus in many cases there are lots of different ways to get to the foreign posting (plane/car/ship/motorbike/combination thereof): how fairly to offer staff a reasonable choice of route and transport option, and stop abuses, and keep costs under control? What if officers wanted to stop over somewhere en route for a few days’ leave? 

When I joined the FCO there were Onerous Rules on all this. Different posts had different travel options. It was all run from London, so as well as filling in forms to get anything done and sending them off in the Bag far in advance, the out-sourced London-based travel centre was tasked to get the best fares. But that did not mean that any given fare was necessarily the cheapest at the time of flight.

So a few years ago the FCO did something sensible.

It abolished all the rules and the travel centre at a stroke. It said that each officer + family members had a certain ‘travel entitlement’ over a full posting to return to the UK, a package whose value was calculated on the basis of x standard flights per year (depending on the post) on the most direct route.

Within that entitlement, all officers and families could use the package as they saw fit (car/plane/ship) over the posting to go where they liked. If they did not use the full package by the end of the posting, the FCO kept the balance.

Result?

Far more flexibility, far fewer people wasting time trying to work through or run or invent ‘rules’, money saved to taxpayers. If someone wants to blow most of the package on a single business class journey, fine.

What exactly is wrong with that?

Shock! 

Another, who left Kuwait this month, fixed a round-the-world trip at taxpayers’ expense – flying business class all the way. The approved route between Kuwait and Britain costs about £1,500 one way. But the official had ‘saved up’ so much public money he planned a seven-week trip to Bangkok, Laos, Melbourne, Queensland, Mozambique, Washington DC and Warsaw.

Horror! Flights have got cheaper. So new options have appeared for using an entitlement. What if the diplomat had flown back to the UK on a standard flight costing the taxpayer more. A better outcome?

Another Foreign Office source said: ‘It is often the high-ranking diplomats who really squeeze out as much free travel as they can by going to post as cheaply as possible. The junior ones usually enjoy travelling business class for the experience.

‘There is complete apathy about this reckless spending, while a silent minority within the FCO rage and fume about this gross extravagance.’

Really? The package does not distinguish much if at all in terms of rank, as I recall. That silent minority is measured at nano-size levels.

Embassy staff also enjoy grace-and-favour homes and huge tax-free salaries.

Lies lies lies.

Diplomats pay UK full income taxes like everyone else and indeed get London Weighting (such as it is) because they are deemed to be home-based for income tax purposes, plus they get taxed on the benefit of the puny car loans they are offered, and so on. Shame and brimstone on the Daily Mail for getting that wrong.

The problem here (if there is one) is that the FCO calculates the travel package for overseas staff on the basis of a single ‘standard’ one-way flight home. Since the travel package was set up, all sorts of new ways of booking flights and other travel plans have emerged, so there is probably no obvious ‘standard’ marker any more.

So some arbitrary level has to be set one way or the other for a financial ceiling for flights home from all those different postings, without creating a heavy bureaucracy to oversee it. Even if the total ceiling was cut for everyone, within that new level there are bound to be opportunities for being creative about how exactly any one journey is created.

This applies to any expenses regime.

Either every single claim within agreed and intricate rules is checked by a sprawling bureaucracy

Or you allow some flexibility for the sake of not making the regime insanely complicated/expensive, and then just accept that some unduly creative interpretation of the rules will take place. It is all really about ‘risk management’ aimed at making intelligent economies for systems as a whole.

Whichever way you choose, you’ll get idiotic media stories about it. 

Either ‘Bureaucracy Gone Mad!’

Or ‘Expenses Abuse Scandal!’

Welcome to government.