Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Expensive Government macros?

How weird, the Department for International Development are able to tell David Simpson MP that the departments travel and subsistence costs for all domestic and overseas travel of Ministers, Advisors and Officials during the last 12 months was £10,838,328.

Yet apparently, in order to tell Theresa May how many overseas trips Ministers, Advisors and Officials have taken will cost to much to answer? This is made all the more bizarre by then saying the information is being compiled for publication in a few weeks anyway.

You cannot seriously tell me that it will cost more than £400 of civil service time to disaggregate foreign and domestic travel from the information they clearly already have in their response to David Simpson?

All they have to do is spend a couple of hours on the logic for a script/macro and then run the bloody thing. Unless they're employing contractors on stupidly high pay rates of more than £200 an hour then the response to Theresa May is total bollocks.

Call me a cynic, but frankly it all just sounds like information handling to me. I wonder what other news may happen on the day the figures for Ministerial travel across Whitehall is published?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If the Departments accounting system is anything like the one where I work it would only be a few minutes work to find the total expenditure, but very time consuming to go through the individual payments to break it down further into domestic travel, foreign travel etc.