Quite a funny thing the spending on hotels and travel amonsgt Goevrnment departments. When the Chancellor was asked how much his department and its executive agenices spent on hotels last year his answer was revealing.
Apparently, they don't have that level of detail and instead have subsistence figures which include both travel and hotels instead. The Treasury for example spent £98,000 on subsistence in the UK, which really isn't very much. The Office of National Statistics meanwhile, who must be good at recording such things) managed to spend £713,000 which, in the scheme of the wide defintion isn't really that much ither I guess.
Then we get to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. The taxman, the man that likes to take our money. They managed to spend £14,100,000 last year. However, this figure wasn't for the wide definition of subsistence. NO, HMRC you see actually break it down, this was just on hotel accomodation in the UK. Isn't it amusing that the highest spender on hotels across the Treasury and its executive agencies would be the agency tasked with getting the money that it spent in the first place? Perhaps they should be doing a deal with TravelLodge to save money?
3 comments:
No problems with your overall argument, but felt obliged to ask if you've considered a comparison of cost per employee? ONS has a couple of thousand staff (or did before they tried to move them to Newport!), whereas HMRC is more like 100,000.
And they all have to stay in hotels?
No, but you'd expect a larger organisation to have more senior management...
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