Over at @TelegraphBlogs my new piece on the government's footling refusal to share a full breakdown of civil servants' travel expenses:
The Coalition will soon be publishing travel expenses for Ministers and senior civil servants, a good step forward. I can just about grudgingly accept that it makes sense not to publish the names of more junior civil servants who have made individual journeys. We want civil servants to get on with their jobs, not grapple with blizzards of possible ill-informed moaning about specific trips.
However, most travel expenses are incurred not by Ministers flying to Hawaii for conferences bemoaning "global warming" but by the Long Tail of more junior journeys across the "wider public sector". It is insulting and undemocratic not to publish clear details of the central government departments and local authorities that have incurred these expenses...
One key reason for having a central procurement service compiling information across the system is precisely to allow the data to be analysed publicly and patterns to be identified. Thus the Foreign Office will incur the huge bulk of its travel costs in international flights, as opposed to domestic UK travel for almost every other government department.
I have made some informal Whitehall inquiries. My strong suspicion is that within these figures there are significant abuses of civil servants in different parts of the government system making expensive first-class or overseas travel arrangements in breach of the existing rules.
The hapless Ms Smith has yielded to internal pressure not to let the guilty people and departments be named and shamed, in the hope of seeing off complaints until the newer and rather more open information flows later this year.
Perhaps the Prime Minister needs to summon Chloe Smith on her eco-friendly bicycle to Number Ten and remind her that back in July 2011 he proclaimed this:
“The information we have published on public spending has rooted out waste, stopped unnecessary duplication and put the brakes on ever-expanding executive salaries … But this whole process isn't something government can do alone – you need to play your part too. Use this information, exploit it, hold your public services to account. They are there for you, so make them work for you.”
Wise words indeed. Ms Smith, you work for us, holding our taxpayers’ money in sacred trust.
We want that departmental travel expenses breakdown. And we want it now.
By the way, I yesterday telephoned both the FCO and Cabinet Office press offices to get some detailed background on how the Whitehall travel expenses system now works.
After a while the FCO got back in touch with me and gave me a sensible background briefing. The Cabinet Office promised to return my call and never did. Jerks.
