A £17m bargain - Thoughts on MOD Hire Car Spending

 

As the new year dawns, some media organisations continue to cling to long outdated nonsensical stories as a way of demonising the MOD and Civil Service. The latest nonsense emerged this week where in the space of one day the MOD was demonised for wasting money by spending on hire cars and the Civil Service was attacked for saving money by selling off offices. In Daily Mail land, its possible to believe two mutually opposed concepts as bad simultaneously…

In the case of the hire car the scandal is that the MOD has spent around £16m on hire cars in the last 12 months under the Project Phoenix contract. This was last a ‘scandal’ in Dec 2021, so like a phoenix rising annually from the ashes, clearly its time to be outraged again. The essence of the story is that the MOD apparently spent £16m on hire cars and about £1m on taxis.  This is the ideal amount of money to be angry about – big enough that its beyond the remit of most people to ever be affordable, but small enough to feel real – people can just about relate what £1m looks like relative to their personal circumstances in a way that £5bn does not. The issue is whether it is right for the MOD to spend this money or if this is an abuse of public funds. Frankly, this should be a no-brainer.

In context terms, £16m is a tiny sum of money when set against the annual defence budget of approximately £48bn. Its not even 0.1% of the annual budget – its more like 0.003% of the entire defence budget. Annualised, the UK spends approximately £131m per day on defence, so this represents approximately 3hrs of spending from the Defence budget, or slightly under one hour of spending on the NHS budget.

The MOD is a globally facing organisation with over 200,000 military and civilian employees who work on every continent on earth and are deployed across dozens of countries and about 2000 different locations. Travel is inextricably linked to how the MOD works, ranging from driving from home to a meeting in a location not served by public transport, to helping move an individual from home to Brize Norton with their equipment prior to a deployment. There are countless reasons why staff need to drive to and from locations for work purposes.

Not everyone who needs to travel for work owns cars or it isn’t always possible for them to use their own car- for example if you are a service family with only one car and you need to travel for work while your partner takes the kids to school which is too far to walk to, then a hire car is the only option. We don’t all live in a world where we can just jump in the car and use it for work purposes without a wider impact.

Frankly given the sheer size of the MOD, the vast range of areas where it works and the amount of time staff need to spend away from home for work purposes, £16m sounds like an extremely good value for money option on hire cars. Given last summer the author was finding quotes for about £100-£150 per day on a small hire car for one person, only spending £16m for 200,000 seems extremely good value.

As anyone who has ever tried to get a hire car out of the MOD will know, its also not exactly full of glamorous sports cars ready to be taken for a spin at the slightest opportunity. Trying to get approval for a hire car and then get one authorised and then get to a site before beginning the battle of getting a car pass (the ongoing lunacy of why the MOD seems to insist on issuing car passes for each site remains one of life’s great mysteries) takes up time, effort and at times an individuals will to live. If anything, the process of getting a hire car in MOD proves that it is anything but an ‘agile’ organisation given the process seems to be utterly disempowering.

If you have somehow managed to pry the hire car keys from the fingers of the MT manager and done your FMT600 covering German road signs (training that the author found REALLY helpful the last time he had to do it to deploy to, checks notes, the Middle East) – and again the FMT600 process is proof that some military admin processes exist purely as a form of torture, for no sane individual would make any grown adult in possession of a driving licence get a second ‘licence’ for reasons that make no sense (those that advocate the FMT600 as a good thing were almost certainly bullied heavily at school) then you still need to get to your destination and hope that the JPA auditors aren’t going to cancel your claim for buying a coffee without a snack (as one Army friend found when he was told he could spend more money for food he didn’t need, but couldn’t claim coffee during a long drive as it wasn’t a meal). The point is that using hire cars in the MOD is not an easy process or one that people undertake lightly…

Similarly, taxi fares are incurred not because the Civil Servants in Whitehall can’t be bothered to walk with the mere mortals, but usually because they’ve been sent on a course in the middle of nowhere, have to take a lot of kit and luggage with them and they need to get a cab from the station to the base. A lot of MOD sites are in out of the way locations served infrequently or not at all by the bus and beyond walking distance – sometimes a taxi is the only way of getting to a meeting. Is it better to insist on people not going to meetings (e.g. not going to work and dialling in remotely) or actually turning up to work and incurring expenses in the process?

This may cause some people to get very confused because they are both angry at spending on taxis, but also angry that Civil Servants are all a bunch of working from home wasters. This latter point came to the fore this week when the Government was attacked for reducing the number of desks in Whitehall as part of estate rationalisation plans. It takes a certain level of shamelessness to attack the Civil Service for saving £1.5bn of public money by closing sites, while criticising it for spending £16m for helping staff go to work to do their jobs. The reality is that for years the Government has tried to draw down on the size of the Whitehall estate which consists of legacy buildings, often very old and not hugely fit for modern working purposes, and where changing working patterns make little sense to keep large amounts of desks empty and unused.  

Whether we like it or not the working world has changed forever and people no longer wish to spend 5 days per week at their desk, including Civil Servants. The reduced demand for desk space while also using opportunities like rationalising the London estate to bolster presence elsewhere in the UK is a sensible move to deliver value for money to the taxpayer and reduce costs for the long haul. It makes perfect sense to draw down on office space and to have more multi-use desks that can be used by multiple staff, not have one desk reserved exclusively in a tiny office for Kevin or Karen to draft their proposals for only issuing MOD car passes to people who have an FMT700 car pass issue licence as well as an FMT600 (signed in triplicate in human blood).

What doesn’t seem to exist is an understanding on what this nation wants from its civil servants and military personnel. Does it want people to work flexibly, operating where needed and attending offices as required and delivering against well defined objectives, being held to account for their performance and working as necessary to make sure they serve the public? Or does it want them to forcibly come into work 5 days per week and sit at desks at considerable extra cost to themselves for no change in outcomes? Is Government about running an expensive estate of property that is kept on not because it is needed, but because it needs to be seen to have people ‘in the office’ or is it about getting the best possible flexibility out of staff and being ruthlessly efficient with public money?

This really comes to the core of the problem – we as a nation cannot decide if we want a civil service that is modern, well paying and embracing modern ways of working to attract and retain talent in line with workforce expectations,  or if we want one that looks and sounds a lot like one from the days of ‘Yes Minister’. Delivering public service costs money – if we treat people who’ve had the audacity to get a hire car so that they can get to work as fiscally incontinent joyriders then all that happens is people get fed up of the overreaction, they stop travelling or they walk away. If we treat the people we ask to keep us safe as subjects for attack in the press simply for taking a taxi to a remote MOD site on safety grounds, rather than walking up the creepy hill in the dark because we can’t possibly be seen to take a taxi, then we create a culture where people feel undervalued and unwilling to go the extra mile. It is vital that articles like this are called out for the nonsense that they are because all it does is create division and unnecessary attacks on public servants who have done nothing more than their jobs.