Last year the Home Office apparently spent £962,533 on taxis. This in itself is quite an impressive sum of money, however, in a response to Mark Hoban MP, Liam Byrne seems to have let something quite worrying slip. In writing to Hoban and giving him the above figure he also said, The majority of expenditure, £666,440, was incurred by the Border and Immigration Agency on operational activities.For once I don't care about the money (that much). I'm slightly more bothered by the news that the Border and Immigration Agency - who as we all know now have flashy new uniforms - are using taxis as operational transport!
I mean sure, I've heard of hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to your own staff. But should the people "protecting" our borders be relying on them to carry out their operational duty? I now have visions of Agency staff waiting to go on a raid in their new uniforms whilst a voice from a phone says in their ear "yeah, it'll be two minutes mate, it's a blue mondeo"
4 comments:
It reminds me of my days as a youngish Civil Servant. I was sent to review the management of a "regional office". We were spending thousands on chauffeur driven cars for very junior staff visiting companies to discuss things like export licensing. "Why" I asked. Well, basically because Government hated giving anyone a car however much they needed it and junior officers without their own cars had to do the visits any way they could. In those days we used the government car service - very expensive but an invisible cost to line managers. Mrs T changed all that but in much of government people without cars are still put into jobs which require lots of visiting that can't "efficiently" be done by other public transport - so they use taxis.
Are you sure it was not to "nick" the illegal immigrants driving these minicabs ? Ask any licensed cabbie !
Alan Douglas
I admire the lateral way they have found to locate illegal immigrants but I am surprised that they still have to pay the fare after dropping the driver off at Harmansworth.
Hahaha... was in a state of such incredulity when blogging it I didn't think of that :)
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